Your chances of becoming obese may be determined before birth
From health food markets to athletic wear stores to calorie-counting iPhone apps, the modern world is pushing us — or at least those of us who are financially able — more and more towards healthier, fitter living. Workout trends like yoga and CrossFit have taken on a cultish air with hordes of devotees who use social media to boast about their workouts and have a pair of lulu leggings for every occasion.
Though the fight for a healthier world has good intentions, this growing movement has remained extremely selfish in nature. Yoga may be rooted in ideas of peace and oneness, but few can deny that what they value most from their practice is more defined abs. However, a recent study on rats may change the way we, women especially, think about our health and the effect it has on others.
According to research from the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, there is a strong epigenetic link between a mother rat’s diet during pregnancy and the likelihood of her offspring developing signs of obesity later in life. In other words, mothers that eat a lot of high fat foods while carrying their young are more likely to have obese children and even grandchildren simply because of a few acquired microscopic changes in their DNA, also known as epigenetic modifications. In light of this information, we may want to adopt a less self-serving attitude towards caring for our bodies and take responsibility for the effect our health will have on future generations.
Mothers that eat a lot of high fat foods while carrying their young are more likely to have obese children and even grandchildren simply because of a few acquired microscopic changes in their DNA.
This is not the first time people have noted a correlation between a mother’s nutrition and that of her children, and it is generally understood that the environment in which a baby is raised has a huge impact on its health. This period of early development is one of the most important in an animal’s life because it sets the stage for future survival and wellbeing. And as the nutrient-rich vessel in which a fetus begins its life journey, the mother must be very careful about what she puts into her body. To get a better idea of the intimate connection between a mother and her unborn child, we can think about the effects of smoking during pregnancy: a cigarette smoked by the mother is essentially a cigarette smoked by the baby as well. Each decision she makes has equally weighty consequences for her infant.
Food intake is no different and has even farther-reaching effects than you might imagine. Recently scientists have identified pathways in our body that control our ability to decide when to start eating and when to stop. Leptin, also known as the “fat hormone,” circulates throughout the body and regulates fat storage. It also controls when the associated POMC gene can produce other proteins that signal to us that we are hungry or full. More importantly, researchers have been able to pinpoint the actual mechanisms that drive these pathways. In this case, methylation, or the addition of a methyl group to the POMC gene, results in reduced POMC expression and reduced hunger control.
Think back to Thanksgiving and that ache you feel in your gut as you scrape the last creamy forkfuls of pumpkin pie off your plate. That gentle but firm nudge is telling you that your stomach is reaching its carrying capacity and would like not to have to digest any more food, thank you very much. Now imagine if that warning never happened, and you continued to eat happily and hungrily until you became physically ill. This might not seem like too big of a deal, but imagine if it happened every time you ate a meal. Eventually, all of this excess eating would begin to pile up unattractively on your body.
In mother rats, gorging on high-fat foods resulted in increased methylation of the POMC gene. Frighteningly, the offspring of overweight mothers were also significantly heavier throughout their lives. Born with the excess methylation they inherited from their fat-consuming mothers, these baby rats were condemned to a life of overeating and obesity that could not be mended simply with a healthier diet. No amount of healthy food was able to reverse these epigenetic changes.
At this point it is hard to say whether the rat model described here is directly applicable to humans. But for now it is best not to underestimate the benefit of eating well for the sake of future generations. Achieving sculpted abs may be a personal success, but protecting your children and your children’s children from a predisposition to obesity is priceless.