Oral Presentation 49th Nutrition Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting 2025

Genetics of sensory nutrition and disease (132474)

Liang-Dar (Daniel) Hwang 1
  1. The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Sensory nutrition is a research area that aims to understand how sensory perception, particularly taste and smell, shapes dietary behaviours, nutrition, and disease risk. In this talk, I will discuss how both genes and the environment contribute to individual differences in taste and olfactory perception, and how these differences influence dietary choices. Building on this foundation, I will highlight our use of genetic and statistical approaches to investigate the causal impact of dietary exposures on health outcomes. Finally, I will introduce a new framework that leverages sensory genetics to strengthen causal inference in nutritional epidemiology, offering insights into how food intake directly contributes to disease risk and prevention.