Supersize me and my kids: metabolic disorders caused by high-fat diet can be passed on to offspring, study finds
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences find in an experiment with mice that health problems related to behavioural or environmental changes can be transmitted to children, triggering fears of a ‘smog-affected’ generation in China
Parents who eat too much junk food or who otherwise survive on a high-fat diet can transmit the metabolic disorders they acquire to their children, according to the results of experiments conducted on mice by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The unhealthy behaviour of the male mice was recorded in a tiny molecule called tsRNA that was found to be transmitted via sperm to the embryo, they said in their paper, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Science.
It ran with a separate study showing similar findings by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, the United States.
The two studies suggested that newly acquired traits can be passed on from one generation to the other, which has disturbing implications for parents living in particularly unhealthy or smoggy environments.
The findings are of interest because biologists have generally rejected this hypothesis in favour of another which says that human genes are constantly mutating, rather than being subject to the changing behaviour of an individual.
According to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Mother Nature decides which traits or species are the fittest to survive.