Nat Genetics: Is obesity also inherited?

Nat Genetics: Is obesity also inherited?

Release date: 2016-03-17

Everyone knows that at the critical time of growth and development, parents' eating habits and cooking methods can have a serious impact on our health. But will the parental diet have a similar effect before we are born?

A mouse-based study found that the eating habits of parents before the birth of a cub can affect the health of the next generation. In the study, scientists found that offspring born to mice fed high-fat diets were more likely to develop obesity and diabetes, although their surrogate mothers had normal body weight and blood sugar levels. This precludes the possibility that the offspring's health is affected by endocrine abnormalities during pregnancy.

The study provides up-to-date evidence of epigenetics that explains how environmental impacts can change our DNA genetic information.

"From a basic research perspective, the study demonstrates for the first time that acquired metabolic abnormalities can be passed on to the next generation in an epigenetic manner," said researcher Johannes Beckers of the German Center for Environmental Health Research.

To prove whether the diet of the parents themselves can affect the health of the offspring, the researchers divided the mice into a high-fat group, a middle-fat group, and a low-fat group. After 6 weeks, mice in the high-fat group began to become obese and the tolerance to glucose was also affected - the hallmark of type 2 diabetes.

Afterwards, the researchers extracted the sperm and eggs of these mice and transplanted the fertilized eggs into healthy mothers by in vitro fertilization.

By feeding high-fat diets to mice born in vitro fertilization, these mice were significantly more severely stressed and glucose tolerant than the control group. This symptom is more pronounced in mice with obese symptoms. The low-fat group had the least weight gain.

“The study shows that parental eating habits are heritable,” says molecular biologist Romain Barres from the University of Copenhagen.

The study was published in the journal nature genetics.

So far, these results have only been established at the mouse level, and they cannot guarantee that these results will work for humans, so we don't have to be crazy. However, what we need to understand is that epigenetics is one of the hottest research fields, and human genetic information may be transmitted between generations through epigenetic modification. We only need to prove whether the diet is one of them.

Source: Bio Valley

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