Check this out:Planning to Have a Baby? What You Eat Now Impacts Your Baby Later (Moms and Dads) One of the most striking aspects of your gut health is its power to influence not only your health but also that of your children and grandchildren. Poor dietary choices can actually become encoded into the gene expression patterns (epigenome) of your DNA and your gut microbiome, leading to permanent changes in the balance of bacteria in your body – changes that may be passed onto your children. As noted in the Nutrition Journal, a mother’s diet may shape her child’s taste preferences in utero, skewing them toward vegetables or sweets, for instance. There’s also evidence that children inherit their microbiome from their mother, and part of this may be “seeded into the unborn fetus while still in the womb.” If a mother has an imbalance of bacteria, she will pass this imbalance onto her child and “thus fails to present the ideal commensals for a proper immune education during her child’s most critical developmental window… This developmental dysbiosis leaves the offspring’s immune system poorly trained to fight off infections and encourages autoimmune and allergic diseases,” Dr. Myles noted. Even a father’s diet plays a role in the child’s future health, as “paternal epigenetics related to methylation of DNA and histones can also be inherited by the offspring and could alter early development of the immune system.” As Dr. Myles explained:9 “Since the information encoded upon DNA is passed from parent-to-child and even potentially from parent-to-grandchild, cells that learn bad habits like ignoring signs of infection or over-reacting to antigens could combine with microbiome shifts to further worsen a child’s immunologic development.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 09:11:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015