This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Just below the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden sits a town called Evercoliques.

It's home to only about a thousand people, but those inhabitants were the subjects of a seminal study in human genetics.

The research suggested that what our parents or even our grandparents ate, whether they grew up during feast or even our grandparents ate,

whether they grew up during feast or famine,

could actually affect our risk of heart disease and diabetes.

It shows that either caloric restriction or excess of food can send depending on the

window of your own development a similar message to the next generation.

Romaine Barres, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

That transgenerational message is sent, of course, through sperm and eggs.

So, Barres and his colleagues compared the sperm of 13 Lean versus 10 obese men.

And they found that the heavyweights had epigenetic changes to their sperm, meaning additional

chemical groups on their DNA that affect how genes are expressed.

And many of those changes were to sequences known to affect brain development, including genes

that regulate appetite.

But the changes weren't permanent because when the researchers studied the sperm of men who

underwent weight loss surgery, they found that many of those genetic alterations reversed

post surgery, especially the ones in areas related to appetite control. The study is in the

journal Cell metabolism. The big question now is how much those epigenetic changes actually

influence the next generation.

Barres is now comparing father's sperm to the cord blood of their babies to find out.

But the finding suggests a mechanism by which our actions, our what should you be eating.

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