DIET-INDUCED OBESITY AND DIABETES CAN BE INHERITED.

Yes!! a new research has shown that you are what your parents ate.Scientists have shown that diet-induced obesity and diabetes can be epigenetically inherited by the offspring through both the eggs and the sperm. The studies by the team of the Institute of Experimental Genetics (IEG) used mice that had become obese and had developed type 2 diabetes due to a high-fat diet. Their offspring were obtained solely through in vitro fertilization (IVF) from isolated oocytes and sperm, so that changes in the offspring could only be passed on through these cells. The offspring were carried and born by healthy surrogate mothers. This enabled the researchers to rule out additional factors such as the behavior of the parents and influences of the mother during pregnancy and lactation. The results showed that both eggs and sperm passed on epigenetic information, which particularly in the female offspring led to severe obesity. In the male offspring, by contrast, the blood glucose level was more affected than in the female siblings. The data also show that,like in humans the maternal contribution to the change in metabolism in the offspring is greater than the paternal contribution. This kind of epigenetic inheritance of a metabolic disorder due to an unhealthy diet could be another major cause for the dramatic global increase in the prevalence of diabetes .The increase in diabetic patients observed throughout the world can hardly be explained by mutations in the genes themselves (DNA) because the increase has been rapid. Epigenetic inheritance as opposed to genetic inheritance is in principle reversible, new possibilities to influence the development of obesity and diabetes arise from these observations, according to the scientists. Charles Darwin stated that characteristics and traits that parents acquire during their lifetime through interaction with the environment could be passed on to their offspring referred to as epigenetics. Epigenetics refers to the inheritance of traits that are not determined in the primary sequence of the DNA (the genes) and RNA transcripts and chemical modifications of the chromatin (e.g. on the DNA or the histones) have been considered as carriers of this epigenetic information. This study shows is important because it proves for the first time that an acquired metabolic disorder can be passed on epigenetically to the offspring through eggs and sperm as Darwin stated.