Your father’s diet before you were born could have affected your health, a new study suggests

Your father's diet before you were born could have played a role in your health, a new study has found.

Your father's diet before you were born could have played a role in your health, a new study has found.

Released earlier this month in Nature, the study from German research group Helmholtz Munich looked at health data from more than 3,000 families. In all, they found a trend linking fathers' bodyweight and their children's, even when accounting for genetics, maternal health and environmental factors.

But laboratory testing conducted as part of the study may indicate that the impacts come down to a small window of time around conception; perhaps a matter of days or weeks.

"Our results suggest that preventive health care for men wishing to become fathers should receive more attention and that programs should be developed for this purpose, especially with regard to diet," Raffaele Teperino, head of Helmholtz' environmental epigenetics department, said in a press release.

"This can reduce the risk of diseases like obesity and diabetes in children."

To corroborate the relationships found in the human-family data, researchers ran laboratory tests in mice, examining sperm samples of specimens exposed to high- and low-fat diets.

Mice given food higher in fat for just two weeks were found to produce offspring with higher risk of metabolic disease, including in some cases a lower tolerance for sugar and a resistance to insulin — traits central to diabetes.