Grandpa's Diet May Affect Grandkids' Disease Risk

1 hour, 19 minutes ago

By Merritt McKinney

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - We are what we eat, or so the saying goes, but
new research suggests that we may be what our parents and grandparents ate
as well.
A new study from Sweden has found that nutrition during
childhood--particularly among boys--may influence the risk of
cardiovascular disease and diabetes in later generations.

Some researchers have theorized that poverty during childhood or
adolescence, which often goes hand-in-hand with inadequate nutrition, may
have a life-long effect. According to this idea, poverty early in life
"programs" the body to be accustomed to inadequate nutrition, not the
high-calorie diet typical in many developed countries today.

Dr. Lars Olov Bygren of Umea University in Sweden and colleagues set out to
see whether the programming effect of nutrition could be passed down to
later generations. They studied three generations born in 1890, 1905 and
1920 in a parish in northern Sweden. During the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, this area was impoverished and harvests were often meager. Based
on historical information, the researchers classified food availability in
any given year as poor, moderate or good.

What a person's parents and grandparents ate appeared to have a significant
impact on their risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, Bygren's team
reports in the European Journal of Human Genetics.

People whose relatives had lived through a famine tended to have a lower
risk of disease, according to the report. For people whose fathers did not
have enough food during the "slow-growth" period of childhood that occurs
before puberty, their risk of cardiovascular disease was lower than normal.
To a lesser extent, the same was true for people whose paternal grandmother
had lived through a famine.
Similarly, having a paternal grandfather who had lived through a famine was
associated with a lower risk of diabetes. But if a paternal grandfather had
plenty of food during his slow-growth period, his grandchildren were about
four times more likely to die with diabetes.
The investigators did not examine the possible causes of the connection
between childhood nutrition and disease risk in later generations, but
Bygren said that the findings suggest that social influences may have an
effect on genetic factors. This turns much of the thinking on the causes of
disease "upside down," according to Bygren.

SOURCE: European Journal of Human Genetics 2002;10:682-688.