Pack in the meat, tofu and eggs and your son will thank you later. Here’s why.
My doctor once told me that my young son should “eat a lot of meat”. Now I have a good reason.
Researchers from Monash University, George Washington University, and the Spanish-based Donana Biological Station have made a new discovery.
A study published in Biology Letters has found that what a man eats while he’s growing up affects how strong his son’s sperm will be.
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It’s actually not necessarily about meat but protein, in general. Researchers studied the affects of high and low protein diets in fruit flies, to come to their conclusions. (Surprisingly, the tiny genes of these insects somehow share characteristics with those of humans).
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Anyways, it was found that when looking at dads, the flies that consumed high-protein diets produced sons who had more competitive sperm than those dads who ate a low-protein diet.
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And the differences didn’t stop there. Scientists also found that the immune response genes were less active in sons of low-protein fathers, and metabolic and reproductive processes were also weaker.
It’s been known for a while that what a man eats can affect the health and count of his sperm.
This, however, is the first time that science has been able to find a correlation between the quality of a parent’s diet early on in life, and the health of their offspring’s sperm, years later.
(photo credit: www.pixabay.com)
Researchers call it a ‘trans-generational effect’ and they’re interested in looking at exactly how it plays out in humans.
Does it matter if you eat a pack of chips a day and always skip out on carrots? Maybe not, but only future generations will tell.
Photo credit: LightField Studios/Shutterstock
