You gotta love a study that finds a weird link between two seemingly disconnected things—in this case, onions and long-term health. Specifically, the development of Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure. That’s exactly what we’ve got today.
According to a new study published in BMC Medicine, researchers have found an intriguing connection between health outcomes and whether you like the smell and taste of onions.
Before you start chomping through onions like they’re apples, just a reminder about a truism in the world of scientific research: correlation does not equal causation.
With that said, an international team analyzed genetic and dietary data from more than 160,000 people in the United Kingdom, looking for links between taste and smell genes, food preferences, and long-term health outcomes.
One result stood out among the pack, likely because it was so oddly specific: people who had a particular variation of the smell receptor gene called OR2T6 were more likely to like onions. That same genetic marker was also associated with lower odds of developing type II diabetes and having lower rates of high blood pressure.
An Onion a Day Won’t Keep the Doctor Away. Or Will It?
The finding isn’t that onions are some kind of miracle vegetable. Or, at least, that’s not what the study says yet. The more remarkable thing is the study’s methodology. The researchers used a technique called Mendelian randomization, which primarily uses genetic traits that are fixed at birth to sort their datasets.
This means that, unlike self-reported diet surveys, which can be unreliable, genetic markers are more stable and might be a better indicator of links between food preferences and disease.
So while it’s still true that correlation does not equal causation, the study’s methodology adds a bit more credence to an otherwise weird, seemingly random connection between food and health.
Still, the authors stress that we shouldn’t put too much faith in any of this until the findings can be replicated in larger, diverse populations. It’s still possible that the genetic marker for onion preference is hiding some other biological process that researchers haven’t identified yet.
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