Reading time: 2 minutes – Spotted on Nature
According to a study carried out on both mice and humans, the results of which were published in the journal Nature, sperm would remember the man’s diet. As a result, a father’s poor diet could impact his sons’ health.
Past studies have shown that mothers can pass on metabolic traits to their offspring. But concerning the fathers, the specialists had not yet commented.
For this study, two male mice were fed a high-fat diet for two weeks. The authors then found that this type of diet led to changes in a type of RNA (molecules carrying genetic information) in the mitochondria (structures inside cells that produce energy) of spermatozoa. .
An inherited poor metabolism
The team of Raffaele Teperino, lead author of the study, then examined the health of mice whose fathers had eaten fatty foods. They found that about 30% of these baby mice had metabolic disorders.
The researchers also analyzed data from 3,431 human children. When the paternal BMI was high at the time of conception, the child was in poorer metabolic health – a term that includes cardiovascular health, liver health and weight management.
The strangest thing is that in the mice, the fathers studied only passed on the metabolic problems to their male offspring. “This suggests that X sperm and Y sperm carry different information”, underlines Qi Chen, researcher in reproductive biology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Salt Lake City. He states that this question will be the subject of future studies, but already recommends eating healthily when producing sperm.
