Pregnant women are often extremely concerned about their diet, but new research suggests men who hope to be fathers should watch what they eat as well.
The study looked at the effect of vitamin B9 (folate), normally found in "green leafy vegetables, cereals, fruit and meats," on pregnancy and childbirth, a McGill University news release reported.
I has been a long-understood fact that women need an adequate amount of folate in their diet in order to prevent a miscarriage. This study suggests men's folate levels before conception could influence the pregnancy's success as well.
"Despite the fact that folic acid is now added to a variety of foods, fathers who are eating high-fat, fast food diets or who are obese may not be able to use or metabolize folate in the same way as those with adequate levels of the vitamin," McGill researcher Sarah Kimmins, said. "People who live in the Canadian North or in other parts of the world where there is food insecurity may also be particularly at risk for folate deficiency. And we now know that this information will be passed on from the father to the embryo with consequences that may be quite serious."
The team compared mice that been fathered by mice with sufficient levels of folate in their diet, and compared them with offspring of folate deficient fathers.
"We were very surprised to see that there was an almost 30 [percent] increase in birth defects in the litters sired by fathers whose levels of folates were insufficient," Doctor Romain Lambrot, of McGill's Dept. of Animal Science, one of the researchers who worked on the study, said in the news release. "We saw some pretty severe skeletal abnormalities that included both cranio-facial and spinal deformities."
The research shows part of the sperm epigenome that are affected by "life experience and diet." The epigenome affects what genes are "switched" on or off, and has been linked to serious ailments such as cancer.
"Our research suggests that fathers need to think about what they put in their mouths, what they smoke and what they drink and remember they are caretakers of generations to come," Kimmins said. "If all goes as we hope, our next step will be to work with collaborators at a fertility clinic so that we can start assessing the links in men between diet, being overweight and how this information relates to the health of their children."
