Everyone talks about pregnant mother’s diet but no one really twist ear of would-be father and demand right diet from him.
No married couple is sincere enough for it.
Result? Poisoned inheritance. Not mere genes! But the environmental ghost (epigenetical factors).
A lack of folate in the diet of male mice reprograms their sperm in ways that damage their offspring. Could the same be true in men?
While female is deemed pregnant after conception, male partner remains pregnant for 9 months before conception (sperms become mature in 72 days. Before it, some period is needed for cleansing of the would-be father’s body).
So if you are planning for child, start focusing on right diet for at least 9 months before you meet your partner for child.
Pregnancy begins from the thought of having child to delivery of the child. At least 18 months. 9 months for male partner’s preparation and 9 months of mother’s nurturing.
Take care!
Research
A lack of folate in the diet of male mice reprograms their sperm in ways that damage their offspring. Could the same be true in men?
DOCTORS recommend that women who are pregnant, or plan to be, eat plenty of green, leafy vegetables. These are a source of vitamin B9—or folate, as it is also known—a substance that helps embryos develop by encouraging the formation of the neural tube, the precursor to the brain and the spinal cord. Folate has never been recommend to putative fathers, though, for the obvious reason that, sperm apart, a father contributes nothing to the physical substance of an embryo.
If the results of research on mice, by Sarah Kimmins and her colleagues at McGill University, in Montreal, are found to apply to people too, that may need to change. For, as they report in Nature Communications, they have discovered something odd: that folate deficiency in fathers can, in rodents at least, be as debilitating for embryos as deficiency in mothers. An absence of folate when sperm are forming causes alterations in them that affect the mice which grow from the eggs those sperm fertilise. In particular, Dr Kimmins saw serious deformities of head, spine and limbs.
This damage seems to be caused by epigenetic modification, the subject of a rapidly emerging field of research. Such modification involves a process called methylation, which alters the behaviour of genes in a way that can be passed from one generation to another. Folate’s job is to regulate methylation. How epigenetic modification might cause the defects Dr Kimmins saw, she does not yet know. But when she and her team looked at changes in the methylation patterns of genes in the sperm of folate-deficient rats they found things there that might cause other phenomena, which are not apparent at birth. These include cancer, diabetes, and even autism and schizophrenia.
