Your Grandfathers’ smoking habits before puberty is why you're an overweight woman today

London, Jan 25: A new study, led by the University of Bristol and published in Scientific Reports today (January 21, 2022), has reported granddaughters and great-granddaughters of men who start to smoke before puberty, are likely to have more body fat than expected.

The study states that if the paternal grandfather had started smoking pre-puberty, compared with later in childhood (1316 years), his granddaughters, but not grandsons, had evidence of excess fat.

To investigate effects of prepubertal exposures in humans, scientists from the University of Bristol have studied possible effects of ancestral prepubertal cigarette smoking on participants in the Children of the 90s, a study of over 14,000 individuals.

An earlier research from 2014, had shown that if a father started smoking regularly before reaching puberty (before 11 years of age), then his sons, but not his daughters, had more body fat than expected.

But, in the new study, no effects were observed in male descendants. They discovered higher body fat in females whose paternal grandfathers or great-grandfathers had started smoking before age 13 compared to those whose ancestors started smoking later in childhood (age 13 to 16).

Further research will be needed to confirm these observations in other longitudinal studies and to expand the investigation into other transgenerational effects and ancestral exposures.

But they did not give a clear reason for why it appears to be affecting women more than men and said more studies are needed to confirm the relationship.

Professor Jean Golding, lead author of the report, said: "This research provides us with two important results. First, that before puberty, exposure of a boy to particular substances might have an effect on generations that follow him. Second, one of the reasons why children become overweight may be not so much to do with their current diet and exercise, rather than the lifestyle of their ancestors or the persistence of associated factors over the years.

"If these associations are confirmed in other datasets, this will be one of the first human studies with data suitable to start to look at these associations and to begin to unpick the origin of potentially important cross-generation relationships. It is with great thanks to participants within the Children of the 90s study that we are able to carry out such pioneering research. There is much to explore."