Your Kids Are What You Eat

Just kidding, I wouldn't eat my children. They're too stringy.

I came across a fascinating article today that talks about Epigenetics: the study of the chemicals that cause your genes to turn on and off. The idea is that although changing your DNA is impossible, changing the behavior of your genes is simple. So much so, in fact, that we all do it. And more crucially, once we've changed the behavior of our genes, the behavior of our children's genes also change. So, for example, if you overeat for a year in your childhood, your children and THEIR children will have altered DNA, practically speaking. In fact, you will have shortened their lives by up to 32 years. (This study was done on children from an area of Sweden called Overkalix.)

Another example: what if you smoke? A lot? What if you started before you hit puberty? Turns out you not only put yourself at risk for cancer, etc -- you also put your children and grandchildren at risk for various health problems, and a significantly shortened lifespan.

When Pembrey, Bygren and Golding looked at the sons of those 166 early smokers, it turned out that the boys had significantly higher body mass indexes than other boys by age 9. That means the sons of men who smoke in prepuberty will be at higher risk for obesity and other health problems well into adulthood. It's very likely these boys will also have shorter life spans, just as the children of the Overkalix overeaters did. "The coherence between the ALSPAC and Overkalix results in terms of the exposure-sensitive periods and sex specificity supports the hypothesis that there is a general mechanism for transmitting information about the ancestral environment down the male line," Pembrey, Bygren, Golding and their colleagues concluded in the European Journal of Human Genetics paper. In other words, you can change your epigenetics even when you make a dumb decision at 10 years old. If you start smoking then, you may have made not only a medical mistake but a catastrophic genetic mistake.

Is anyone else horrified by the implication that we can ruin the lives of the generations to come by our stress levels, bad health, etc?