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IF YOU think you eat too much and at the wrong times, you can stop fretting.
Your dining habits are governed by your genes, a study of identical and
fraternal twins has revealed.

鈥淐hanging these factors is equivalent to trying to change one鈥檚 breathing,鈥�
says John de Castro, a behavioural scientist at Georgia State University in
Atlanta.

He reasoned that if genes exert a strong influence on eating patterns, adult
identical twins would have very similar dining preferences even if they live
apart. Such similarities would be less common in fraternal twins, who do not
share identical genes.

To test this theory, de Castro鈥檚 team asked 110 adult identical twins and 155
adult fraternal twins to keep a seven-day diary of all their meals and snacks,
as well as how hungry they felt before and after each meal. They also recorded
how many people they dined with.

The diaries revealed that identical twins were nearly twice as likely to
enjoy similar dining habits as fraternal twins, even though all lived apart. The
identical twins showed uncanny similarities in the time of day they preferred to
dine, how much they ate, and their feelings of hunger and satiety before and
after the meal. They also had similar preferences for how many dining companions
they liked having around.

The fraternal twins did not share similar eating habits. This means that
upbringing is unlikely to have much effect on dining tastes, says de Castro. 鈥淚
have yet to see evidence that early environment and upbringing have any
influence at all on what people eat as adults,鈥� he says.