Effect of lifestyle and paternal feeding on the offspring’s metabolic programming

This review was aimed at showing the importance of the father lifestyle on offspring phenotype. The focus was to highlight the father’s exposure to detrimental substances like alcohol and cigarettes and practice of physical exercises, as well as the role of some pollutants and diet components and their consequences to the offspring. The search was based on PubMed’s indexing articles. For that, studies focusing on mothers were excluded, while studies using humans or animals (rats and mice) focusing on the father were included. The research keywords were: “paternal,” “exercise,” “alcohol,” “stress,” “diet,” “programming,” “smoking,” “bioactive compounds,” and “xenobiotics.” The developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) paradigm postulate that both maternal and paternal environments have an important role on the metabolic response of offspring in adulthood. The paternal preconception lifestyle might be able to promote epigenetic modifications with reverberation on a number of offspring’s metabolism processes. Differences in diet composition may promote increased body weight gain and risk of cancer development, while caloric restriction can decrease the body weight and adipose tissue depots. On the other hand, the practice of physical exercises protects against diet-induced obesity. Nonetheless, the mechanisms involved in paternal and maternal preconception life and their repercussions on next generations are not fully understood. Diet composition, practice of physical exercises, and consumption of a variety of drugs may cause sperm modifications on an epigenetic pattern, which results in genomic responses that may lead to increased risk of several diseases; however, further studies are needed.