Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

.j.p. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Talata.

Got a minute?

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

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 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 Barras, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

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

So Barras 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,

...