Your high-fat diet may impact the lives of your children

The lifestyle choices we make today could affect generations to come (image) iStock.

If you consume a lot of fat, are obese or show the signs of being diabetic, you could be creating lasting ramifications for your kids – even if they haven't been born yet.

That's the finding from new research published in Nature Genetics that found male sperm can transmit the characteristics of the father's lifestyle – what he eats, drinks and smokes – onto his children.

The researchers came to this conclusion after feeding three groups of mice a high-fat, low-fat or a normal diet over a period of six weeks.

They then took sperm and eggs from each group of mice and implanted the artificially fertilised embryos into healthy surrogate mothers.

The results were surprising – the researchers found that the offspring of obese, high-fat parents gained more weight on a high-fat diet than those who came from lean parents.

It’s a finding that adds fuel to the theory that our lifestyle choices cause DNA mutations which are then passed on to our children, and could explain the sudden rise in patients suffering from diabetes.

"This [finding] could be another major cause for the dramatic global increase in the prevalence of diabetes since the 1960s," says professor Martin Hrabě de Angelis, who led the study.

It's all about epigenetics

The explanation of how our diets affect our children comes down to something called "epigenetic inheritance", which explains how a parent passes on their DNA to their offspring.

Professor Merlin Crossley, the dean of science at the University of New South Wales, says that epigenetics ("epi" is Greek for "on top of") explains how the lifestyles of your parents can dramatically affect your DNA.

"We inherit our genes from our parents – if they are tall and strong then you might be tall and strong too. But there is some evidence that we are also influenced by what happened to our parents," Crossley tells ninemsn Coach.

"There is some evidence from around the time of World War II that parents who were starving gave birth to children who then had long-term metabolic health issues, and what’s more their children were also affected. In other words the environment appeared to affect the genes."

Epigenetics, as Crossley explains, has been studied for decades, but it’s only recently that we've begun to learn how our lifestyle choices "turn on" and "turn off" certain genes in our offspring.

"Epigenetic inheritance, the thing we are discussing here, is the long term turning on and off of genes that are stable across generations," advises Crossley.

"This has been known for many years but the effects of diet and inheritance of disorders associated with metabolism have become big topics recently."

"This is because of the obesity epidemic – but it is all very controversial still."

Your choices now could affect generations to come

We know that during pregnancy, if an expecting mother smokes, drinks, eats too much or too little, there's a considerable chance that the child will be affected.

What epigenetics tries to explain is how the genetic mutations that occur before we conceive are passed on for generations.

"Epigenetics provides another explanation and says that some of these effects may last for generations. The idea is that doing all those things [drinking, smoking, overeating etc] even before one is pregnant may modify genes and these may be inherited by the child," explains Crossley.

"But the extent of these dangers is controversial. In general we are talking about increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. The risks are serious but the magnitude of the effects remains under study."

Here in Australia, the rate of diabetes cases is expanding exponentially with around 1.7 million Australians currently diagnosed with type 1 or 2 diabetes. It's estimated one person contracts the disease every five minutes.

Type 2 diabetes, the kind that's largely contracted as a result of lifestyle choices, accounts for 85 percent of all diabetes cases in Australia.