You Are What Your Father Eats: Dad's Diet Impacts Unborn Children

Ever hear the phrase "you are what you eat"? Apparently, it's not all up to you. A new study has shown that you are what your father eats, revealing that a dad's diet before conception plays an important role in the health of their children.

When it comes to studying the health of offspring, mothers are the ones that usually receive the attention. Yet fathers play an equally important role. In this case, the researchers focused on vitamin B9, also called folate. It's well known that in order to prevent miscarriages and birth defects, mothers need to receive an adequate amount of folate in their diets. Yet it seems as if the same might be true for fathers.

In order to better understand the role a father's diet plays in the health of their offspring, the researchers examined mice. They compared the offspring of fathers with insufficient folate in their diets with the offspring of fathers whose diets contained sufficient levels of the vitamin. In the end, they found that paternal folate deficiency was associated with an increased level of birth defects of various kinds in the offspring.

"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," said Sarah Kimmins, one of the researchers, in a news release. "People who live in the Canadian North or in other parts of the world where there is food insecurity may also be particularly at risk for folate deficiency. And we now know that this information will be passed on from the father to the embryo with consequences that may be quite serious."

In fact, the scientists found that there was an almost 30 percent increase in birth defects in the litters sired by fathers whose folate levels were insufficient. There were skeletal abnormalities that included spinal deformities and other serious defects.

 "Our research suggests that fathers need to think about what they put in their mouths, what they smoke and what they drink and remember they are caretakers of generations to come," said Kimmins in a news release.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.