Two recent studies have suggested that poor paternal eating habits could alter genetic material during the development of a fetus, potentially predisposing the child to certain illnesses. In other words, not only are poor lifestyle habits dangerous to our health, but their negative impact can be passed on to the next generation!

We know that we are made up of a combination of genes from both of our parents, following the fertilization of the woman's egg by the man's sperm. What is less known, however, is that this genetic makeup is not the only factor responsible for our appearance and our personality. Generally speaking, the genetic makeup that we inherit from our parents is strongly influenced by a huge number of factors that come from our surroundings, a phenomenon called epigenetics.

The interaction with social environment, various life experiences (good ones or traumatic ones), and what we eat all play a huge role in our genetic makeup and how we act. The profound differences that allow us to distinguish human beings from one another are not only genetic differences, but also epigenetic, meaning that these genes are altered based on lifestyle.

Non-hereditary transmission

In addition to modifying genetic expression after birth, we have known for years that environment can also influence a child's development even before birth. This is the result of another poorly understood phenomenon, but it is possible that epigenetics play a role in preparing the coming generation for the lifestyle conditions that are waiting for them.

The famines that hit Europe during the Second World War are good examples of this phenomenon. In Holland, for example, the resistance of the country's people to Nazi rule during the war forced them to drastically reduce their intake of calories (less than 1,000 per day), which was particularly cruel for women who were pregnant at the time (between October 1944 and May 1945). Subsequent studies showed that the children who experienced these nutritional restrictions early in the pregnancy were more susceptible to various metabolic disorders (increase in blood lipids and glucose intolerance), as well as a tendency to become obese. It would appear that the information about calorie deficiency transmitted to the fetus by the mother led to a reprogramming of her metabolism to allow her to accumulate as many calories as possible. However, when these babies were born, the war and famines were finished and their metabolisms became too overactive for a normal diet.

Dad also plays a role

While the influence of a mother's diet on the health of her future child is intuitively easy to understand, recent studies have suggested that the father's diet could also have an impact on the newborn. By using animal subjects, researchers recently observed that children with fathers who had a diet rich in fats quickly demonstrated an intolerance to sugar, as well as the loss of their ability to secrete insulin compared to animal offspring exposed to normal diets (1).

These anomalies are associated with major modifications to the expression of many genes stemming from cells in the pancreas. Similarly, another group of researchers showed that children born to fathers with diets lacking in protein showed irregularities when it came to the expression of many genes involved in metabolizing fats and cholesterol (2).

The inter-generational transmission of metabolic problems stemming from a poor paternal diet show, in a shocking fashion, to what extent what we eat can affect the way the body functions. For men who want to have children, these studies also suggest that dads can also play a positive role in the future health of their children by adopting healthy lifestyle habits, including a proper diet.