You are what your parents ate! Diet-induced obesity, diabetes epigenetically inherited by offspring
You are what your parents ate!
Date:
March 14, 2016
Source:
Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health
Summary:
Scientists have shown that diet-induced obesity and diabetes can be epigenetically inherited by the offspring via both the oocytes and the sperm.
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Is your health affected by what your parents ate? Diet-induced obesity and diabetes can be epigenetically inherited by the offspring, according to new research in animals.
Credit: © Schum / Fotolia
For its studies, the team of the Institute of Experimental Genetics (IEG) used mice that had become obese and had developed type 2 diabetes due to a high-fat diet. Their offspring were obtained solely through in vitro fertilization (IVF) from isolated oocytes and sperm, so that changes in the offspring could only be passed on via these cells. The offspring were carried and born by healthy surrogate mothers. This enabled the researchers to rule out additional factors such as the behavior of the parents and influences of the mother during pregnancy and lactation.
"The results showed that both oocytes and sperm passed on epigenetic information, which particularly in the female offspring led to severe obesity," said Prof. Johannes Beckers, who directed the study. In the male offspring, by contrast, the blood glucose level was more affected than in the female siblings. The data also show that -- like in humans -- the maternal contribution to the change in metabolism in the offspring is greater than the paternal contribution.
Possible explanation for rapid spread of diabetes worldwide
"This kind of epigenetic inheritance of a metabolic disorder due to an unhealthy diet could be another major cause for the dramatic global increase in the prevalence of diabetes since the 1960s," said Prof. Martin Hrabe de Angelis, director of the IEG and initiator of the study. The increase in diabetic patients observed throughout the world can hardly be explained by mutations in the genes themselves (DNA) because the increase has been too fast. Since epigenetic inheritance -- as opposed to genetic inheritance -- is in principle reversible, new possibilities to influence the development of obesity and diabetes arise from these observations, according to the scientists.
In their theories on heredity and evolution, both Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin explicitly stated that characteristics and traits that parents acquire during their lifetime through interaction with the environment could be passed on to their offspring. It was not until the neo-Darwinist "Synthetic Theory of Evolution," which combines the theories of natural selection by Darwin and of genetics by Gregor Mendel, that the inheritance of acquired traits was rejected. "From the perspective of basic research, this study is so important because it proves for the first time that an acquired metabolic disorder can be passed on epigenetically to the offspring via oocytes and sperm- similar to the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin," said Professor Johannes Beckers.
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nichomachus
(12,754 posts)HockeyMom
(14,337 posts)My adult daughter weighs 170 lbs. She got that way from how I ATE, or fed her as a child? Put the blame on the individual ADULT, not their parents.
hedda_foil
(16,368 posts)It really answers many of the old nature vs. nurture dichotomy with "Yes but..."
ellenrr
(3,864 posts)(I'll see if I can find the link) about how effects of trauma (mental/emotional/psychological) can also be passed down epigenetically.
Unfair!
Baobab
(4,667 posts)Lots of chemicals are so called Endocrine Disruptors...
They are extremely dangerous, and all around us
Many plastics have these EDCs - now they are found in house dust- in cities and they are building up in peoples bodies and causing a lot of disease
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4399291/
many of them make people and their offspring fatter.
Mary Mac
(323 posts)I've been watching lots of PBS, and they're really down on grains. The farm belt is killing us.