A mother’s health has a huge influence on the health of her unborn child, and it is easy to find many articles, books, and classes that teach mothers how to eat the proper balance of nutrients to nourish their babies while in utero. Many sources also instruct future mothers on how to prepare themselves before they conceive, and among the advice given is encouragement to eat well and take multi-vitamins. Having recently had a baby myself and having navigated through piles of books with “to-do” lists for mothers-to-be, I find it interesting that comparatively few sources discuss the impact that the health of a father has on a baby. But the lack of focus on a father’s health is quickly changing, especially since more and more research studies on this topic have been conducted in the last several years, which point to fathers having a strong influence on the health of their children, even before they are born. This article was particularly interesting to me because as a new parent I try to have the best interests of my daughter in mind, and I want to give her the best chances of being as healthy as possible. If I had known that my husband’s diet plays such an important role in the health of our children, we probably would tried to have an even healthier diet before having her.
A new study, featured on the National Science Foundation website, reports that there is a link between a father’s diet and the health of his offspring. Michal Polak and Joshua Benoit, both professors of biology at the University of Cincinnati, conducted a research study with fruit flies, to find out if manipulating the diets of the males had any influence on how many of their offspring were viable. The researchers chose to study fruit flies because they are inexpensive and space efficient test subjects and, more importantly, because they have a high reproductive capacity. Female fruit flies can lay an astonishing 50 eggs per day, which makes it easy to test for environmental influences on many different offspring.
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| Fruit Fly Closeup (Photo by Michal Polak/UC) |
For this study, the researchers separated males and females into different glass vials, and they fed all the females an identical, well-balanced diet. They also controlled for age, to limit maternal influences on the offspring. The males, however, were separated into 30 different groups, which were all given different diets. They were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the diets were all drastically different in both caloric value and nutritional balances. After 17 days the researchers allowed the fruit flies to mate, with two different females one right after another, and then they placed each female fruit fly in an isolated vial for them to lay their eggs. the researchers used microscopes to carefully observe the resulting fertilized eggs, determining how many of the eggs hatched or had viable embryos after 24 hours.
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Fruit Flies in Glass Vials (Photo by Andrew Higley/UC)
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They found that embryo mortality was the highest among the groups of male fruit flies with the poorest diets (with high carbs and low protein); they also observed that the body composition of the males was correlated with the ability of the offspring to survive. They noticed that the two different matings also had slightly different results. Polak said that “The second copulation is where the effects of diet really became stronger,” and that “Emaciated males in poor condition produced embryos with a higher rate of mortality. But only in the second copulation.” When commenting on the results of their research, Polak stated, “We expect there to be an effect from maternal diet on offspring. But it was a real surprise to find a link between paternal diet and offspring” (UC biology study, 2017). He also noted that a father’s health has a “protective role to play for the embryo.”
I chose to write about this article because I think it’s fascinating how many areas of our life diet influences. I keep reading over and over about new connections between diet and different aspects of health that I wouldn’t have thought were directly connected, but are. For that reason I think that this topic is also relevant to our society because the USA has a shockingly high infant mortality rate for a first world country, and it makes me wonder if diet has anything to do with it. My textbook from my Lifespan Development class states that the United States ranks number 6 for highest infant mortality in developed countries worldwide (Rathus, S., 2013, p. 91). And a report by the CDC published in 2014 compared the infant and child under 5 years old mortality rates of European countries and the USA; the USA had the highest rates on the list (CDC, 2014).
-HQ
Sources:
UC Biology Study: You are what your dad eats. (2017, October 11). Retrieved January 22, 2018, from http://magazine.uc.edu/editors_picks/recent_features/fruitfly.html
CDC. (2014, September 24). International Comparisons of Infant Mortality and Related Factors: United States and Europe, 2010. Retrieved January 22, 2018, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf
Rathus, S. (2013). Discovery Series: Introduction to Lifespan. S.l.: Wadsworth.
I had never considered the influence that a father's diet would have on an infant, so i found this post fascinating, and it left me with questions. If a father decided to change his diet to benefit his future children, how long before conception would he have to make the change for it to have an affect on the child? The fruit flies only ate their specified diet for 17 days, do you think it would be similar for humans? Maybe even sooner? I ask this because i'm interested to know how intense and rapid the effects of his diet would be. For example: if a child was conceived on a day that the father ate really well, would the child be healthier than if it was conceived on a "cheat day." - DA
ReplyDeleteI think that there are two things to remember in consideration of your question:
Delete1) fruit flies have a lifespan of less than 50 days (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3582515/), whereas the lifespan of a typical human male is around 70 years.
2) With the lifespan of the male fruit fly and the male human in context, we know from what we learned about meiosis I and II that the formation of the sperm begins before conception. - since conception is when the gametes form the zygote. In fact, this study states that sperm can mature in the male body for up to 70 days before ejaculation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3582515/), so it would reason that a man would need to change his diet at least 70 days before trying to conceive.
I really liked this post because of all of the information that it comes with. I personally don't have kids but it interests me to understand how my eating habits can affect my children even before they are born. Because the child is born from the mother how much in difference does her eating habits affect the child when compared to the father? In the case of the fathers, how does that initially affect them and how does that tie into the fathers traits of DNA that the child inherits? Alex L.
ReplyDeleteIt is obvious that a pregnant woman will want to eat a healthy diet throughout her pregnancy so the fetus can develop normally. But more importantly, the health of the egg and sperm is vital, as it is the very beginning of development where many things can go wrong. For example, a folate (vitamin B9) deficiency from the father is associated with increased birth defects in the offspring, which include craniofacial and musculoskeletal malformations. DNA methylation (methyl groups are added to the DNA molecule and can change the activity of a DNA segment) in sperm can play a part in the development of chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, autism and schizophrenia. (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3889)
DeleteSQ
Fascinating Article, and congratulations on your new child! I'm a father of two myself (soon-to-be three), and my diet isn't the best. My question is how bad do you think a father's diet has to be before it starts to show in the children? Since fruit flies are much simpler organisms than humans, it makes sense to me that they would be more vulnerable to outside factors like a father's diet, etc. It seems like a more complex organism, like a human, would have more protections against things like that, so a father's diet and consumption habits would have to be pretty drastic to notice a sizable change, which is why the human race hasn't suffered too much from most of our history when we didn't really have a great understanding of nutrition. What do you guys think? Also, this article focuses on embryo development and mortality rates. Do you think other problems like mental health, etc. could be linked to a father's diet?
ReplyDelete-AC
In response to your first question are you asking how bad does it have to be before it would affect his current children or future children? For either situation I would say that a fathers diet affects his children unborn, or living, yet the effect would obviously be greater in the living children as a result of them watching the fathers diet as well as inheriting the fathers diet habits.
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AC, good question! You're right that it doesn't seem like the human race suffers too drastically, although it does seem like mental illness is on the rise. I searched pretty extensively to see if I could find more information about whether (and to what extent) a father's diet might affect their child's mental health or other health issues but I couldn't find a single research article on the subject. One of the articles I read also recognized that there aren't enough systematic controlled studies on the topic, and there aren't any reports of the influence of fathers with eating disorders. However, they did say that "the available evidence suggests that children of mothers with eating disorders are themselves at increased risk of disturbance in a variety of domains." Since it appears that a mother's nutrition affects their offspring in multiple ways, I think this is a topic that is worth looking more deeply into! - HQ
DeleteSource: Park, R., Senior, R. & Stein, A. The offspring of mothers with eating disorders. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (2003) 12(Suppl 1): i110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-003-1114-8
In regards to the effects of a father's diet before conception, a recent study suggests that the father's diet is just as influential as the mother's (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131210113315.htm). Specifically, they found they found that mice born to fathers with insufficient folate had a higher rate of birth defects than those born to fathers with sufficient folate. In humans, they also noted that "despite the fact that folic acid is now added to a variety of foods, fathers who are eating high-fat, fast food diets or who are obese may not be able to use or metabolize folate in the same way as those with adequate levels of the vitamin." These two findings/observations show that a father's diet does indeed affect the health of their children before birth/conception.
Delete-SP