Obesity Linked To Grandparent's Diet
| Fri Nov. 21, 2008 6:12 PM PST
At least in mice. So far. Nature reports on research presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Mice fed on a high-fat diet during pregnancy and lactation had larger-than-normal offspring. Those offspring also went on to have larger-than-normal offspring.
The 1st-generation offspring also tended to overeat, whether they were fed a high-fat or normal diet. Plus they were insulin-insensitive, a feature of diabetes that often leads to obesity. The 2nd-generation offspring did not overeat, but were large and insulin-insensitive too. Male pups born to mothers on a high-fat diet also transmitted the traits to their own offspring.
The U of Pennsylvania team wants to know which genes were involved in passing on these traits. So far they've found epigenetic changes in the hypothalamus, which controls feeding behaviour. Epigenetic changes are biochemical modifications that affect how DNA functions without actually altering its nucleotide sequence. Epigenetic changes can be induced by environmental and/or genetic factors.
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The mice in the experiment didn't get fat, probably because mice don't tend to fatness. However because overeating predisposes people to obesity, humans would likely get fat in similar circumstances. Therefore if people inherit both a tendency to overeat and insulin insensitivity, the cycle of pathological obesity would be hard to break.
And yet so much more than our individual health depends on it. Skinny stem cells anyone?
Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the PEN USA Literary Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal.
Comments
Submitted by Dog G (not verified) on Sat Nov. 22, 2008 12:51 AM PST.
"overeating predisposes people to obesity"... no - how can it be! :)
Its a pretty sick thought: A woman is carrying a child, a female. If she comes into contact with some kind of toxin that makes its way into her blood and into her baby, it can affect the baby. But because the baby is also carrying eggs, that toxin also affects the woman's potential grandchildren.
The stuff you learn dating a geneticist.
Obesity
Submitted by Ginna Dorkin (not verified) on Tue May. 5, 2009 10:07 PM PDT.
How can it be "overeating predisposes people to obesity" that means we are not responsible for being overweight, its not our but our grandparents faults. Eating too much of junk food, not getting enough exercise, lazy life is not our fault. Wow great idea.
So should that mean our
Submitted by Genny (not verified) on Tue Jul. 7, 2009 2:29 PM PDT.
So should that mean our obesity rates we are confronting in the present will be a lot higher in the future? We'd better be sure of that now while we still can do something about it because we are already confront obesity problems specially in US, I don't want to think about how our grandchildren would look.
Genny, Xenical
High fat diet
Submitted by Dr. Childers (not verified) on Sun Jul. 26, 2009 10:28 AM PDT.
So the Inuit eating traditional 70% animal fat diets (the same type of diet that got us through the ice ages), must have bigger...and bigger...and BIGGER children with each successive generation!? I don't beleeve it, and neither should you.
I propose it is the types of fat we eat, and not fats per se, that cause cancer and obesity (and learning disabilities and growth aberrations and infertility and...and...). Cave man did not eat skinless chicken breasts prepared in soybean oil. We should look at the evidence of diets that brought us to this century through millions of years, not diets we invented over the past 200 years, and certainly not the industrialized diets of the past half century.
My two cents.
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