You Are What Your Parents Eat
Why epigenetics matters in the fight against the chronic-disease epidemic
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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.
