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SYDNEY: A man's diet before he has children can affect the health of any daughters, increasing their risk of diabetes and obesity, Australian medical researchers said.
According to the 2008 government report Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020, over 60% of adults and one in four children are overweight or obese. This new research may have the potential to help slow this obesity epidemic, the researchers said.
"This is the first report of non-genetic, intergenerational transmission of the consequences of a high fat diet from father to offspring," said Margaret Morris of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and author on the Nature paper.
How children get diabetes
"We've known for a while that overweight mums are more likely to have chubby babies, and that a woman's weight before and during pregnancy can play a role in future disease in her children, partly due to the critical role the intrauterine environment plays in development," said Morris.
This study is unique, however, in showing that a father's environment, in this case a high fat diet, plays a role in the future of his children.
The researches fed male rats a high fat diet and then mated them at 14 weeks old with normal-weight females. The rats, which weighed on average 22% more than the control rats, displayed glucose intolerance and other diabetes-like characteristics. Their female offspring displayed similar impaired glucose tolerance and insulin secretion as young adults.
Like father, like daughter
The results indicate that females can inherit some of the consequences of their father's environment. These are not changes to genes themselves, but 'epigenetic' changes.
Epigenetic changes are changes to the way a gene is expressed - for example activating or deactivating a gene to create protein - either creating more or less of a particular protein, for example, due to proteins associated with the DNA.
It shows that the chances of developing diseases such as obesity are increased even if mothers are healthy. "A family history of diabetes is one of the strongest risk factors for the disease; however until now, the extent of any influence of non-genetic paternal factors has been unclear," said Morris.
Epigenetics researcher Jeff Craig at the University of Melbourne Murdoch Children's Research Institute said "this landmark finding adds weight to the largely circumstantial evidence from human studies showing that parental habits such as diet and smoking can influence the health of their children." Though he does caution that rats and humans differ in physiology.
