These changes they say continue beyond the meal itself, and have the ability to alter natural metabolic responses to diet - the scientists say human cells are able to "remember" and replicate the effects of a poor diet on the body and by having a good diet we can pass on a healthy epigenome to our children.
The researchers suggest this may be why obesity and some diseases can run in families over generations.
The researchers led by Associate Professor Assam El-Osta that a chemical change in the body initiated by a high-glucose diet can continue for up to weeks after exposure to the food.
The team were interested to discover how long lasting the effects of a good or bad diet persisted for, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the early metabolic environment is remembered later in life.
Professor El-Osta says it is now know that the chocolate bar eaten this morning can have very acute effects, and those effects continue for up to two weeks later - this is referred to as the burden of memory and the changes initiated by diet create a kind of "ghost" that lives within our genes.
Dr. El-Osta says these epigenetic changes remember the effects of glucose and continue to respond to them for days or even weeks and the cells demonstrated a "memory" of that high glucose event even when the same cells were returned to their previous state.
Dr. El-Osta says humans have only one genome and once the DNA sequence is written it doesn't really change nor can we really control it, but, we actually have thousands of epigenomes which we can control, and, these epigenetics changes means what we eat and how we live can alter how our genes behave.
The researchers say a poor diet can increase a person's chances of disease and the complication of diseases, but it appears that a continued good diet can help safeguard future generations against the vagaries of environment.
Dr. El-Osta said the research confirmed we all have a responsibility to our genes and though the genome we inherit from our parents is fixed and does not change, the epigenome can be altered and hopefully we can nurture our epigenomes for the future.
Katon also noted that some new antipsychotic medications used to successfully treat bipolar disorders are safer and more comfortable for the patient in some ways than previous medications, but can cause weight gain leading to obesity and other metabolic changes that predispose people to Type 2 diabetes. Some mood stabilizers, Katon added, also are associated with weight gain and metabolic disorders.
Katon mentioned new attempts to try to reduce premature death in people with bipolar disorder. These include providing psychiatrists and other mental health professionals with guidelines and training in monitoring their patients' basic physical health and teaching them how to advise their patients about smoking cessation, exercise and other preventive measures.
"Changes are also occurring in medical schools to teach new physicians in all specialties how to recognize psychiatric illnesses and to understand the serious health risks associated with mental illness," Katon said.
Increasingly, community mental health centers are adding primary-care physicians and nurse practitioners to the staff to see patients for medical conditions, he said. Medical specialty centers are also adding mental health professionals to diagnose and treat the depression, anxiety and other psychic distress that often accompany serious illnesses.
"Psychiatrists are now on the staff of a growing number of medical specialty clinics, such as centers for diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and at primary-care centers, such as family medicine practices," Katon said. "Mental health professionals are working side-by-side with providers who treat medical illnesses. New approaches to health care and wellness programs are being tested at a number of places to find effective models for preventing premature deaths associated with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses."
washington/