Can Mom’s Diet Shape Baby’s Genes? Study of Pregnant Mice Suggests So

You are what you eat, and perhaps in some ways, what your mother ate. Back in 2003, Cheryl Rosenfeld's team found that the diet they fed to pregnant mice caused a "striking variation" in the sex ratios of the offspring: High fat favored males, low fat favored females. Now Rosenfeld has a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that says the mother's diet can also affect the very way genes are expressed in the placenta. To figure this out, Rosenfeld's team studied the placentas attached to fetal mice 12 and a half days after conception, when the mice were midway through gestation but had yet to produce sex hormones like estrogen or testosterone (those can also alter gene expression, which would have confounded the study). They found that gene activity in the placentas differed significantly depending on whether the mom was fed a high- or low-fat diet. The biggest differences were found when comparing the high- and low-fat placentas linked to female fetal mice,