Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence: blandine. This study aimed to characterize paternal diet during the peri-conception period and its associated characteristics. These cross-sectional analyses were based on fathers from the French nationwide ELFE birth cohort recruited in Maternal dietary patterns, identified in a previous analysis, were moderately and positively related to the similar patterns among fathers.
Keywords: dietary patterns, principal component analysis, fathers, familial characteristics, socioeconomic position. The developmental origin of health and disease theory postulates that the prenatal environment modulates developmental patterns in the fetus and, hence, affects health and the risk of diseases across the life course [ 1 ].
Nutrition is a major determinant of the prenatal environment, and its effect starts even before pregnancy. The maternal pre-conception nutritional status provides nutrients for the early developing embryo and is also able to alter epigenetic processes that are highly active and sensitive early in life [ 2 ].
However, the developmental origin of health and disease theory has so far mainly been focused on maternal influences, even though the paternal diet may also induce phenotypic changes in the offspring [ 3 , 4 ]. In animal experiments, paternal food deprivation before conception affected glucose regulation in offspring [ 5 ], whereas paternal exposure to an unhealthy diet was related to altered liver function and gut microbiota in offspring [ 6 ].
Epigenetics could be an underlying mechanism of this intergenerational transmission [ 7 , 8 ]. Besides nutrition, paternal preconception health and lifestyle have been found to be related to birth defects and malformations in offspring or adverse birth outcomes.
