According to a new study, male mice who exercise have healthier offspring than their sedentary counterparts. The results are uncertain for humans, but they support the idea that some of the benefits of exercise are passed on to the next generation.
Kristin Stanford, a physiology and cell biology researcher at The Ohio State University College of Medicine’s Wexner Medical Center, conducted a mouse study that provides new insights into how maternal and paternal exercise improves the metabolic health of offspring.
The study, led by Laurie Goodyear of the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School, was published online in the journal Diabetes. This study used mice to see how their lifestyles (eating fatty foods vs. healthy and exercising vs. not exercising) affected their offspring’s metabolites.
Metabolites are substances produced or used by the body when it digests food, drugs, or chemicals, as well as its own fat or muscle tissue. This process, known as metabolism, generates energy and the materials required for growth, reproduction, and health maintenance. Metabolites can be used to diagnose diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
We have long been interested in the role of parental exercise in improving the metabolic health of their children. These data are the next step in understanding how this works. We have previously shown that maternal and paternal exercise improve health of offspring.
Kristin Stanford
“Tissue metabolites contribute to overall metabolism, including glucose or fatty acid metabolism, and thus systemic metabolism. We have previously shown that maternal and paternal exercise improve health of offspring. Tissue and serum metabolites play a fundamental role in the health of an organism, but how parental exercise affects offspring tissue and serum metabolites has not yet been investigated. This new data contributes to how maternal or paternal exercise could improve metabolism in offspring,” Stanford said.
Other studies have linked the parents’ poor diet to the development of type 2 diabetes and impaired metabolic health. Researchers looked into the effects of parental exercise training in the presence of high-fat feeding on offspring metabolic health in this study.
They used targeted metabolomics (the study of metabolites) to see how maternal exercise, paternal exercise, and the combination of maternal and paternal exercise affected the metabolite profile in offspring liver, skeletal muscle, and blood serum levels.
“We have long been interested in the role of parental exercise in improving the metabolic health of their children. These data are the next step in understanding how this works” Stanford is a member of the Dorothy M. Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute and the Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center at Ohio State.
Metabolites are substances produced or used by the body when it digests food, drugs, or chemicals, as well as its own fat or muscle tissue. This process, known as metabolism, generates energy and the materials required for growth, reproduction, and health maintenance. Metabolites can be used to diagnose diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
This study found that all forms of parental exercise improved whole-body glucose metabolism in offspring as adults, and metabolomics profiling of offspring serum, muscle, and liver reveal that parental exercise results in extensive effects across all classes of metabolites in all of these offspring tissues.
“Any understanding of how these tissue metabolites are regulated could help us understand how tissue metabolism works and provide some ideas to benefit or improve tissue glucose or fatty acid metabolism. This could eventually lead to the development of new therapeutic tools or metabolic targets “According to Goodyear.
Future research will elucidate the specific role of exercise in mediating these metabolites and determining their role in improving offspring health, particularly in muscle and liver. The National Institutes of Health provided funding for this study.
