... and your father didn’t like fry-ups

FATHERS have long had it easy with their preconception health, as it was thought their fitness had no effect on a baby’s well-being.

But evidence is emerging that a man’s lifestyle — if he smokes, is overweight or depressed — can affect the health of his offspring.

Last month, a study by the Wellcome Trust CRUK Gurdon Institute, in Cambridge, found that, as well as passing on DNA, sperm transfer chemical switches — known as epigenetic tags. These tags directly change which genes are turned on and off in the embryo, thereby affecting how it develops for life.

Recent research from Stockholm University found that if a father develops depression before conception or in the first six months of his partner’s pregnancy, there’s a much higher risk of their child being born prematurely, either because the quality of the father’s sperm is affected, or because his depression places stress on the mother.

Men who smoke in the years before conception are significantly more likely to father children with asthma, research from the University of Bergen suggests.

This supports worrying evidence compiled by Professor Marcus Pembrey, a geneticist at the University of Bristol, that men who had started smoking before the age of 11 had sons who were more likely to be obese by the time they were teenagers.

Fathers eat can also have an impact on the baby, with those who had had high-fat diets since childhood having daughters with a high risk of diabetes.

In a similar finding, having an obese father but normal-weight mother may put female offspring at higher risk of breast cancer, according to an animal study that was published last year.