A challenge to all GMO supporters.

[pnwmom]

118. The researchers disagree with you. They don't think it's a simple function of fewer calories leading

Last edited Wed Mar 4, 2015, 07:50 PM - Edit history (3)

to smaller children.

And their paper was published in 2012 by the peer-reviewed publication Biochemie, part of the Elsevier group, along with Lancet and Cell.

I've also linked to another, more recent published study you probably aren't aware of.

You need to keep up.

http://www.livescience.com/21902-diet-epigenetics-grandchildren.html

In 2010, Jiménez-Chillarón and his colleagues took this a step further and found that overfed male mouse pups developed the telltale signs of metabolic syndrome — insulin resistance, obesity and glucose intolerance — and passed some of these traits to their offspring, which then developed elements of metabolic syndrome without overeating.

But what still is missing, Jiménez-Chillarón told LiveScience, is an understanding of how such information is remembered from generation to generation. Unlike a gene mutation, all of the epigenetic inputs to the DNA environment should be forgotten when a newly formed embryo begins to divide.

"The dogma is that during the process of meiosis [cell division], all epigenetic marks are erased," said Jiménez-Chillarón. "But our work, as well as [the work] from many others, suggests that this is not completely true. Although the majority of epigenetic marks is erased, some marks are spared for unknown reasons."

The Abstract of Jimenez-Chillaron's peer-reviewed publication:

http://alcat.cl/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/7.-Epigenetica-la-nutricion-modela-la-genetica.pdf

Nutrition plays a key role in many aspects of health and dietary imbalances are major determinants of chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer. Adequate nutrition is particularly essential during critical periods in early life (both pre- and postnatal). In this regard, there is extensive epidemiologic and experimental data showing that early sub-optimal nutrition can have health consequences several decades later.

The hypothesis that epigenetic mechanisms may link such nutritional imbalances with altered disease risk has been gaining acceptance over recent years. Epigenetics can be defined as the study of heritable changes in gene expression that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic marks include DNA methylation, histone modifications and a variety of non-coding RNAs. Strikingly, they are plastic and respond to environmental signals, including diet. Here we will review how dietary factors modulate the establishment and maintenance of epigenetic marks, thereby influencing gene expression and, hence, disease risk and health.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39841/title/Epigenetic-Effects-of-Mom-s-Diet/

Maternal nutrition around the time of conception can affect the regulatory tagging of her child’s DNA from the earliest embryonic stages, according to a study published today (April 29) in Nature Communications, which focused on a population of women and children in Gambia.

The West African country has distinct rainy and dry seasons that dictate its inhabitants’ diets, making nutrition easy to track. Branwen Hennig from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and her colleagues sought to determine whether Gambian women’s nutrition at conception affected their infants’ patterns of DNA tags, or methyl groups. The researchers profiled maternal blood samples, looking for nutrients linked to methylation, and examined methylation patterns of infant hair and blood DNA, homing in on specific sites called metastable epialleles—sequences where methyl groups appear to be added randomly, compared with the more-predictable patterning of much of the rest of the genome.

Because Hennig’s team found similar methylation patterns in the blood and hair samples from the same individuals, and because these patterns varied among individuals, “the authors demonstrate that these loci properly fulfill the criteria of metastable epialleles,” Gavin Kelsey, an epigeneticist with the Babraham Institute and the University of Cambridge, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “This is clearly an interesting paper,” said Kelsey, who was not involved in the work, adding that the study extends upon previous reports linking maternal nutrition with epigenetic tagging in both mouse and human offspring.

“The real advance of this study is that we nailed it that these regions in the human genome are bona fide metastable epialleles,” said study coauthor Robert Waterland, a nutritional epigeneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “Not only does [the variation] occur stochastically and is influenced by maternal nutrition before and during pregnancy, but also it occurs systemically,” throughout the early embryo, he added.