(credit: Human Genome Project)
A crummy diet can obviously have a lasting impact on the waistline—but for parents, it may also have a lasting impact on DNA and the family line, a new study suggests.
Compared with skinny mice on a standard or low-fat diet, genetically similar mice that became obese on a high-fat, high-calorie diet were more likely to have obese offspring at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. While researchers have noted such a familial influence on metabolic disorders before, the new study took the extra steps of producing the pups by in vitro fertilization of the sperm and eggs from the obese parents, implanted in slim, surrogate mothers. This experimental setup eliminates confounding influences from mom and dad, such as chemicals in seminal fluid, molecular signals in utero, microbiome transfers, and components of breast milk.
The finding, published Monday in Nature Genetics, provides clean support for the theory that poor diet and/or obesity in parents produces epigenetic changes—chemical tags and other molecular switches of DNA that alter how the genetic code is read and translated, rather than the code itself. And those changes can get passed down to offspring and influence their metabolism and health.
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