How Will Genetic Influences Determine Your Future Child's Obesity Risk?

Genes essentially determine much of our risk for obesity.

Now, recent findings published in The FASEB Journal have found that a mother's eating habits during pregnancy and lactation carry a profound impact on her offspring and their propensity for developing certain weight issues, including an increased risk to obesity.

Researchers from the Life Sciences at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel found that this link hinges on the blocked expression of a gene called Pomc, which works through a discrete area of the brain that controls feeding behavior. With excess methylation on the DNA sequence blocks that express the gene, it leads to a late satiety response that causes increased food intake and eventually, obesity.

"Parental obesity and diet can affect the children's likelihood to overeat and develop obesity. Changes in epigenetic programming have been implicated as one of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon," said Asaf Marco, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, in a news release. "We observed a clear correspondence between a specific epigenetic mechanism and weight gain, potentially allowing for early detection and prevention of obesity."

For their findings, researchers fed female rats either a high-fat diet or a standard diet from post-weaning to adulthood in separate groups throughout pregnancy and lactation. All of the offspring, including those of the high-fat treated rats, received standard food after weaning until adulthood.

Researchers analyzed blood levels for hormones and brain secretions for epigenetic modification on the specific DNA sequence of interest. Results showed that unmated female rats who were chronically fed a high-fat diet presented normal weight and a normalized epigenetic mechanism. However, methylation on the genes is typically considered stable and relatively permanent, and may open the door for future drug development.

"Shining light on heritable, epigenetic factors that cause obesity should help us shed unwanted pounds in future generations," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of the journal. "This research shows that being overweight and obese has a direct impact on the genes we use to signal when it's time to stop eating."