Abstract
The health impairments derived from both alcoholism and obesity are well known. However, reports that relate increased alcohol use with increased measures of obesity have been mixed in their findings, especially with respect to genetic factors that could potentially link these two behaviors. Here, using a large sample of adults from the UK (n ≈ 113,000), we report both the observed and genetic correlations between BMI (kg/m2) and two measures of alcohol use: reported quantity (drinks per week) and frequency of use (from never to daily). Overall, both observationally and genetically, alcohol intake is negatively correlated with BMI. Phenotypic correlations ranged from −0.01 to −0.17, and genetic correlations ranged from −0.1 to −0.4. Genetic correlations tended to be stronger than the phenotypic correlations, and these correlations were stronger in females and between BMI and, specifically, frequency of use. Though the mechanisms driving these relationships are yet to be identified, we can conclude that the genetic factors related to drinking both more and more often are shared with those responsible for lower BMI.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen N, Sudlow C, Downey P, Peakman T, Danesh J, Elliott P, et al (2012) UK Biobank: current status and what it means for epidemiology. Health Policy Technol, 1(3):123–126.
Baum-Baicker C (1985) The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption: a review of the literature. Drug Alcohol Depend 15(3):207–227. doi:10.1016/0376-8716(85)90001-8
Breslow RA, Smothers BA (2005) Drinking patterns and body mass index in never smokers: national health interview survey, 1997–2001. Am J Epidemiol 161(4):368–376. doi:10.1093/aje/kwi061
Bulik CM, Sullivan PF, Kendler KS (2003) Genetic and environmental contributions to obesity and binge eating. Int J Eat Disord 33(3):293–298. doi:10.1002/eat.10140
Chang CC, Chow CC, Tellier LC, Vattikuti S, Purcell SM, Lee JJ (2015) Second-generation PLINK: rising to the challenge of larger and richer datasets. Gigascience, 4(1):7.
Colditz GA, Giovannucci E, Rimm EB, Stampfer MJ, Rosner B, Speizer FE et al (1991) Alcohol intake in relation to diet and obesity in women and men. Am J Clin Nutr 54(1):49–55
Dallongeville J, Marecaux N, Ducimetiere P, Ferrieres J, Arveiler D, Bingham A et al (1998) Influence of alcohol consumption and various beverages on waist girth and waist-to-hip ratio in a sample of french men and women. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord 22(12):1178–1183
Duncan AE, Grant JD, Bucholz KK, Madden PA, Heath AC (2009) Relationship between body mass index, alcohol use, and alcohol misuse in a young adult female twin sample. J Stud Alcohol Drugs 70(3):458
Eisen SA, Lyons MJ, Goldberg J, True WR (1993) The impact of cigarette and alcohol consumption on weight and obesity. An analysis of 1911 monozygotic male twin pairs. Arch Intern Med 153(21):2457–2463
Gearhardt AN, Corbin WR (2009) Body mass index and alcohol consumption: family history of alcoholism as a moderator. Psychol Addict Behav 23(2):216. doi:10.1037/a0015011
German JB, Walzem RL (2000) The health benefits of wine. Annu Rev Nutr 20(1):561–593
Gruchow HW, Sobocinski KA, Barboriak JJ, Scheller JG (1985) Alcohol consumption, nutrient intake and relative body weight among US adults. Am J Clin Nutr 42(2):289–295
Heath AC, Martin NG (1994) Genetic influences on alcohol consumption patterns and problem drinking: results from the Australian NH&MRC twin panel follow-up survey. Ann N Y Acad Sci 708:72–85
Hellerstedt WL, Jeffery RW, Murray DM (1990) The association between alcohol intake and adiposity in the general population. Am J Epidemiol 132(4):594–611
Kleiner KD, Gold MS, Frostpineda K, Lenzbrunsman B, Perri MG, Jacobs WS (2004) Body mass index and alcohol use. J Addict Dis 23(3):105–118
Krug I, Pinheiro AP, Bulik C, Jiménez-Murcia S, Granero R, Penelo E et al (2009) Lifetime substance abuse, family history of alcohol abuse/dependence and novelty seeking in eating disorders: comparison study of eating disorder subgroups. Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 63(1):82–87. doi:10.1111/j.1440-1819.2008.01908.x
Lands WE, Zakhari S (1991) The case of the missing calories. Am J Clin Nutr 54(1):47–48
Lee SH, Yang J, Goddard ME, Visscher PM, Wray NR (2012) Estimation of pleiotropy between complex diseases using single-nucleotide polymorphism-derived genomic relationships and restricted maximum likelihood. Bioinformatics 28(19):2540–2542. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bts474
Lichenstein SD, Jones BL, O’Brien JW, Zezza N, Stiffler S, Holmes B, Hill SY (2014) Familial risk for alcohol dependence and developmental changes in BMI: the moderating influence of addiction and obesity genes. Pharmacogenomics 15(10):1311–1321. doi:10.2217/pgs.14.86
Lieber CS (1991) Perspectives: do alcohol calories count? Am J Clin Nutr 54(6):976–982
Loh P-R, Tucker G, Bulik-Sullivan BK, Vilhjálmsson BJ, Finucane HF, Salem RM, Chasman DI, Ridker PM, Neale BM, Berger B, Patterson N, Price AL (2015a) Efficient Bayesian mixed-model analysis increases association power in large cohorts. Nat Genet 47(3):284–290
Loh P-R, Bhatia G, Gusev A, Finucane HK, Bulik-Sullivan BK, Pollack SJ et al (2015b) Contrasting regional architectures of schizophrenia and other complex diseases using fast variance components analysis. Nat Genet 47:1385–1392
Lukasiewicz E, Mennen LI, Bertrais S, Arnault N, Preziosi P, Galan P, Hercberg S (2005) Alcohol intake in relation to body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio: the importance of type of alcoholic beverage. Public Health Nutr 8(03):315–320
McGue M, Zhang Y, Miller MB, Basu S, Vrieze S, Hicks B et al (2013) A genome-wide association study of behavioral disinhibition. Behav Genet 43(5):363–373
Munn-Chernoff MA, Duncan AE, Grant JD, Wade TD, Agrawal A, Bucholz KK et al (2013) A twin study of alcohol dependence, binge eating, and compensatory behaviors. J Stud Alcohol Drugs 74(5):664–673
Nova E, Baccan GC, Veses A, Zapatera B, Marcos A (2012) Potential health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption: current perspectives in research. Proc Nutr Soc 71(02):307–315
Purcell and Chang (2016) PLINK v1.90b3.34. PLINK v1.90b3.34 [Computer Software]. https://www.cog-genomics.org/plink2
R Core Team (2015) R: a language and environment for statistical computing [Computer Software]. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org/
Sayon-Orea C, Martinez-Gonzalez MA, Bes-Rastrollo M (2011) Alcohol consumption and body weight: a systematic review. Nutr Rev 69(8):419–431. doi:10.1111/j.1753-4887.2011.00403.x
Slane JD, Burt SA, Klump KL (2012) Bulimic behaviors and alcohol use: shared genetic influences. Behav Genet 42(4):603–613
Stunkard AJ, Foch TT, Hrubec Z (1986) A twin study of human obesity. JAMA 256(1):51–54. doi:10.1001/jama.1986.03380010055024
Sudlow C, Gallacher J, Allen N, Beral V, Burton P, Danesh J et al (2015) UK Biobank: an open access resource for identifying the causes of a wide range of complex diseases of middle and old age. PLoS Med 12(3):e1001779
Turkheimer E (2011) Still missing. Res Hum Dev 8(3–4):227–241. doi:10.1080/15427609.2011.625321
UK Biobank. (2016). [Web page]. Retrieved from http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/
Vattikuti S, Guo J, Chow CC (2012) Heritability and genetic correlations explained by common SNPS for metabolic syndrome traits. PLoS Genet 8(3):e1002637
Visscher PM, Hemani G, Vinkhuyzen AAE, Chen G-B, Lee SH, Wray NR et al (2014) Statistical power to detect genetic (co)variance of complex traits using SNP data in unrelated samples. PLOS Genet 10(4):e1004269. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1004269
Volkow ND, Wise RA (2005) How can drug addiction help us understand obesity? Nat Neurosci 8(5):555–560. doi:10.1038/nn1452
Volkow ND, Wang GJ, Fowler JS, Telang F (2008) Overlapping neuronal circuits in addiction and obesity: evidence of systems pathology. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 363(1507):3191–3200. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0107
Volkow ND, Wang GJ, Fowler JS, Tomasi D, Baler R (2012) Food and drug reward: overlapping circuits in human obesity and addiction. Curr Top Behav Neurosci 11:1–24. doi:10.1007/7854_2011_169
Vrieze SI, McGue M, Miller MB, Hicks BM, Iacono WG (2013) Three mutually informative ways to understand the genetic relationships among behavioral disinhibition, alcohol use, drug use, nicotine use/dependence, and their co-occurrence: twin biometry, GCTA, and genome-wide scoring. Behav Genet 43(2):97–107
Wannamethee SG, Shaper AG, Whincup PH (2005) Alcohol and adiposity: effects of quantity and type of drink and time relation with meals. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord 29(12):1436–1444. doi:10.1038/sj.ijo.0803034
Whitfield JB, Zhu G, Madden PA, Neale MC, Heath AC, Martin NG (2004) The genetics of alcohol intake and of alcohol dependence. Alcoholism 28(8):1153–1160. doi:10.1097/01.ALC.0000134221.32773.69
World HH (2000) Obesity: preventing and managing the global epidemic. World Health Organization, Geneva
World HH (2002) The world health report 2002: reducing risks, promoting healthy life. World Health Organization, Geneva
Yang J, Benyamin B, McEvoy BP, Gordon S, Henders AK, Nyholt DR et al (2010) Common SNPS explain a large proportion of the heritability for human height. Nat Genet 42(7):565–569. doi:10.1038/ng.608
Yang J, Manolio TA, Pasquale LR, Boerwinkle E, Caporaso N, Cunningham JM et al (2011) Genome partitioning of genetic variation for complex traits using common SNPS. Nat Genet 43(6):519–525. doi:10.1038/ng.823
Yeomans MR (2010) Alcohol, appetite and energy balance: is alcohol intake a risk factor for obesity? Physiol Behav 100(1):82–89. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2010.01.012
Zaitlen N, Kraft P, Patterson N, Pasaniuc B, Bhatia G, Pollack S, Price AL (2013) Using extended genealogy to estimate components of heritability for 23 quantitative and dichotomous traits. PLoS Genet 9(5):e1003520
Acknowledgements
AGW is supported by NIAAA Grant 3T32AA7464-38 S1 (PI: Paula Hoffman). LME is supported by NIH Grant Number 4R01MH100141-04 (PI: Matthew Keller). CH is supported by NIDA Grants DA032555 and DA035804. This work utilized the Janus supercomputer, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (award number CNS-0821794) and the University of Colorado Boulder. The Janus supercomputer is a joint effort of the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Colorado Denver and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
Amanda G. Wills, Luke M. Evans, and Christian Hopfer declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Authors of the present analysis did not interact with participants. Details about UK Biobanks’s procedures can be found at: http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/EGF20082.pdf?phpMyAdmin=trmKQlYdjjnQIgJ%2CfAzikMhEnx6.
Informed consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Authors of the present analysis did not interact with participants. Details about UK Biobanks’s procedures can be found at: http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/EGF20082.pdf?phpMyAdmin=trmKQlYdjjnQIgJ%2CfAzikMhEnx6.
Additional information
Edited by David Allison.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wills, A.G., Evans, L.M. & Hopfer, C. Phenotypic and Genetic Relationship Between BMI and Drinking in a Sample of UK Adults. Behav Genet 47, 290–297 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-017-9838-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-017-9838-2