You are what you eat. That one’s simple enough. You are what what you eat eats. Try saying that in a hurry. But, again, simple enough. If you feed an animal a sub-optimal or even a maladaptive diet—let’s say you immobilise a cow and stuff it full-to-bursting with genetically modified corn and soy—the food that animal produces will not be as nutritious as if it had eaten the proper diet. You’re also what your parents eat. Allow me to explain.
This statement is true in the obvious sense that, if you’re a child and you live in a household where your parents cook badly or don’t cook at all, you’re going to suffer as much as they do, especially if all they stock the cupboards and fridge with is ultraprocessed food.
Lucky Charms, Cheetos, Hot Pockets, Pop Tarts, Hot Dogs, microwaveable burgers, soda etc.
And what’s worse, living in such a household will make more of a difference for you, since you’re a child, passing through crucial developmental stages that can’t be passed through again—and you won’t have a choice, either. It’s not like you can choose to spend your pocket money at the organic farmers’ market every Saturday instead.
The statement is true in another sense. What a mother eats during pregnancy can have profound effects on the development of her baby. This is intuitive knowledge—ancestral wisdom—possessed by many small-scale societies. The great dentist-cum-anthropologist Weston A. Price, in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), discussed the lengths to which people in traditional societies would go to provide the most nutritious food during and also after pregnancy, when a mother was breastfeeding.
The Maori of New Zealand, for example, would travel great distances to acquire special kinds of shellfish, including enormous spider crabs, to feed pregnant women. Shellfish and crustaceans are among the most nutrient-dense foods known to man; although sadly the seas and oceans are now so polluted seafood is not something you should eat regularly.
Scientific research confirms the benefits of this natal and post-natal care. Studies show, for example, how drastically consumption of eggs during pregnancy can benefit the developing fetal brain and how the breastmilk of vegan mothers lacks crucial nutrients, like vitamin b12, which can lead to potentially life-threatening deficiencies in babies and infants.
But the statement is also true in yet another sense. What your parents eat before they conceive you can also have profound effects on your health. This is the science of epigenetics, and it’s revolutionising our understanding of inheritance.
Previously, it was the biologist’s dogma that inheritance took place only at the level of the gene. The information that gets passed on from parents to offspring is contained in their genes. The only way to alter inheritance is either to change the parentage—one or both—or to introduce mutations to the gene.
Different genes, different information, different inheritance.
Except it’s not that simple. We now know that environmental factors can change what’s known as the expression of the gene. Without getting into too much unnecessary detail, that just means there are different ways a gene can be activated—or indeed turned off.
A new study shows that fathers who are obese pass on severe metabolic dysfunction to their children not because of genes, but because of epigenetic changes to their sperm.
The scientists looked at male rodents that became obese on a high-fat diet. Even when their offspring were fed a normal diet and didn’t develop obesity, they still displayed telltale metabolic signs of obesity, including glucose intolerance and insulin resistance, which mark the onset of diabetes.
Analysis revealed the obese fathers were producing much more of a microRNA called let-7 in their fat tissue. MicroRNAs are messenger molecules that control the amount of protein cells produce. The let-7 molecules were also present in the sperm of the obese fathers, and were transferred, via the sperm, to their offspring during reproduction.
In the embryo, the let-7 interfered with the production of an enzyme called DICER, which controls the production of other microRNAs and also regulates gene expression.
Without the DICER, the embryo’s cells developed faulty mitochondria, the organelles responsible for energy production, causing the metabolic dysfunction observed when the offspring were born.
It sounds complicated, and it is. The main takeaway is, as I said, that this has nothing to do with genes. Being obese through overeating transfers harmful effects to the offspring without making any changes at the level of the genome; genetically you’re the same, but you’re not the same person.
Follow-up experiments showed the same thing happens in humans too: Obesity triggers massive production of let-7 in the fat tissue and the sperm.
The good thing, at least, is that losing weight appears to reverse this harmful process. The scientists put 15 obese men on a six-month diet and exercise program and found the more weight the man lost, the lower the let-7 levels in his sperm at the end of the experiment.
This study reminds us of a number of things. It reminds us there’s still a lot we don’t know about chronic disease and especially its transmission across the generations. What we do know, at least, is that harmful effects and risk factors for chronic disease can be transmitted without changes to the gene. This is true of obesity. We also know it’s true of exposure to harmful chemicals. In fact, not only can the effects of a single exposure ramify through generations who have never been exposed themselves, but the effects can actually get worse with the passage of time. That’s a sobering thought. Epigenetics significantly complicates the problem of dealing with chronic disease, and reminds us that movements like Make America Healthy Again will have to be generational programs that go well beyond the standard short-term constraints of the election cycle.
Beyond that: a simpler truth. Good health is not just a lottery bestowed upon us by fate, the gods, God or our genes, but the product of choices we all make for ourselves and one another.
One Response
Yo Alex, when you have another kid, will they inherit the DNA from Nick Fuentes’ cum that you’re constantly drinking?