[科学美国人60秒] SSS 2015-12-04

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Just below the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden sits a town called ?verkalix. It’s home to only about a thousand people. But those inhabitants were the subject of a seminal¹ study in human genetics. The research suggests it that what our parents, or even our grandparents ate, whether they grew up during feast or famine, could actually affect our risk of heart disease and diabetes³.

It shows that either calorie restriction⁴ or excess of the food, can send, depending on the window of your own development, a similar message to the next generation. R. B. a molecular⁵ biologist of University of Copenhagen.

That trans-generational massage⁶ is send of course through sperm⁷ eggs, so B. and his colleagues compare the sperms⁸ of thirteen lean versus⁹ ten obese¹⁰ men.? And they found that the heavyweights had epigenetic changes to their sperms, meaning additional chemical groups on their DNA¹¹, which affects how their genes¹² are expressed. And many of the changes were to sequences known to affect brain development, including genes regulate appetite. But the changes were not permanent. Because when the researchers study the sperms of men under weight loss surgery, he found that many of those genetic² alterations¹³ reversed post-surgery, especially the one in areas related to appetite controlThe study is in the journal Cell Metabolism¹⁴. The big question now is how much those epigenetic changes actually influence the next generation. B. now compare father’s sperms to the cord bloods of their babies to find out. But the finding suggest a mechanism¹⁵ by which our actions, our eating habits, our fitness can affect our children, which might make you wonder what should you be eating. And how long should you be doing push-ups before you conceive your child.

It’s a long road before we know what is optimal¹⁶ for our children. And what may seem to be optimal today, like the partaking a holiday feasting, may come back to haunt your children’s children, like the ghost of the Christmas past.

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