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In the obese child can be to blame the father who started too early to smoke
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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Scientists from Britain came to the conclusion that men who tried to smoke at an early age (before 11 years), children will be prone to obesity. This study once again confirms the fact that the lifestyle of parents directly affects the health of future offspring. As noted by scientists, tobacco smoke, which enters the body of a man even before puberty, can lead to disruption of metabolic processes in the next generation. As the leading researcher of this scientific project believes, the newly revealed intergenerational effect of tobacco smoke will help to study in more depth modern problems of obesity, and also help in prevention.
According to some reports, in many countries the number of smokers is declining, but according to the World Health Organization, around a billion men around the world smoke. Despite the fact that in a number of previous studies, both in animals and in humans, there was an established intergenerational effect on health as a result of tobacco smoke, but all evidence was so far limited. This research project indicates that tobacco smoke triggers in the body processes that are capable of affecting the environment, lifestyle, etc. Turn on or off some of the genes in the offspring. For such a study, the scientists went after the work of Swedish colleagues who found the relationship between male overeating and the death rate of his grandchildren. For their work, specialists have access to data on the lifestyle, health, genetics of nearly 10,000 men.
In monitoring the next generation, the researchers found that the sons of those men who tried cigarettes before 11 years of age had the highest body mass index in adolescence (13-17 years) compared to those whose fathers started smoking at a later age or did not smoke at all. However, a similar effect was not noted in daughters. Now independent experts do not hurry up with conclusions. According to one nutrition specialist, this discovery will allow us to look at the factors that provoke obesity in childhood.
But all these studies only point to the relationship between early childhood smoking and obesity in the son, but there is no exact confirmation of this. Genetics specialists note that the data are quite convincing, however, a number of additional studies should be carried out, which will confirm the link between smoking and changing epigenetics in the child's DNA.
Today, fewer and healthier children are born in the world, and not only tobacco smoke is the cause of this. However, now scientists have established that the more popular smoking was, the more children were born with congenital diseases of the respiratory system. In this case, it is not only about tobacco smoke that enters the body of a pregnant woman (with passive or active smoking) and leads to fetal pathologies or premature birth. The greatest danger of smoking is that prolonged smoking causes mutations in the body, which are also transmitted to the next generation. During the research it was found that the smokers disrupted the normal functioning of more than a hundred genes, among which there are genes related to DNA, and these processes are already irreversible.
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