On the heels of one more study showing effect of a mother’s diet on offsprings that shows her inadequate iron intake can affect brain development in infants, two independent studies show that even a father’s food can impact his sperm affecting the children’s health.
The studies, released last week by research groups in China, France and the US show the paternal diet can affect levels of genetic material called small RNAs in sperm that can in turn influence gene expression in children.
“We’ve found that paternal diet can influence the expression of genes in early embryos,” said Qi Chen, a reproductive biologist at the University of Nevada in the US who is the first author of one of the studies. ” But we still don’t know how exactly the changes occur,” added Chen, who collaborated with scientists from institutions under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Shanghai.
Chen and his colleagues fertilized mouse eggs using sperm from male mice fed a high fat diet and male mice consuming a normal diet. The offspring of fathers fed a high fat diet showed impaired glucose tolerance and insulin resistance — a precursor to diabetes — as early as seven weeks. The condition worsened by 15 weeks.
In the second study, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the US and the University of Lyon in France found that protein- deficient diets can affect the levels of small RNA in mature sperm in mice.
These changes may suppress specific genes, including one that controls the behaviour of mouse embryonic stem cells. The findings of both studies appeared in the American journal Science . The scientists say their findings corroborate what appears to be growing evidence that parental diet can affect the health of offspring.
Last year, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology in Germany had shown that loading sugar in the diet of male fruit flies one or two days before they mate can lead to obesity in their offspring through changes that influence gene expressions in the embryos. The study by Anita Ost, now at Linkoping University in Sweden, and her colleagues was published in the journal Cell.
Meanwhile, a report in the journal Paediatric Research says researchers at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles showed that inadequate iron intake by pregnant women can affect brain development in infants in a subtle but significant way. Their study based on magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) of the newborn, suggested that low maternal dietary iron might be associated with lower complexity of the cortical grey matter shortly after birth.
“These findings are consistent with our expectations,” Bradley Peterson, director of the Institute of the Developing Mind, said in a media release issued by the Children’s Hospital.” Our findings add brain based assessments to growing evidence that common inadequacies in maternal nutrition influence a child’s development, even before birth.” Some surveys estimate that between 35 and 58 per cent of healthy women have a degree of iron deficiency.
