A recent study has revealed that a father’s diet before conception plays an important role in the health of the offspring.
The study, which is led by McGill researcher Sarah Kimmins, has found that the father’s diet may play an equally important role as the mother’s diet before conceiving the baby.
The researchers have focused on vitamin B9, also called folate, found in a range of green leafy vegetables, cereals, fruit and meats, and have discovered that the father”s folate levels is very important to the development and health of their offspring.
The study also suggested that the fathers should pay as much attention to their lifestyle and diet before they set out to conceive a child as mothers do.
Kimmins said that fathers who eat 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.
She said that 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.
The researchers worked on mice, and compared the offspring of fathers with insufficient folate in their diets with the offspring of fathers whose diets contained sufficient levels of the vitamin. They found that paternal folate deficiency was associated with an increase in birth defects of various kinds in the offspring, compared to the offspring of mice whose fathers were fed a diet with sufficient folate.
Dr. Romain Lambrot, of McGill”s Dept. of Animal Science said that they were very surprised to see that there was an almost 30 per cent increase in birth defects in the litters sired by fathers whose levels of folates were insufficient and severe skeletal abnormalities were also found in the offspirings, that included both cranio-facial and spinal deformities. (ANI)