Epigenetics Clues to Obesity and How Lifestyle Changes Could Modify Your Epigenetic Profile

Adiposity is a condition of being severely overweight or obese and it has numerous connections to epigenetics. Understanding more about the epigenetics underlying obesity could help to introduce preventions based on lifestyle changes which may be able to modify our epigenetic marks and improve health.

A rough measure of obesity is body mass index, BMI, which can be calculated by dividing one’s body weight in kilogram by the body height in square meters. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) adiposity is characterized by a BMI over 30 kg/m². Adiposity is associated with several secondary diseases like type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular diseases, fatty liver and disorders of the adipose tissue.

Epigenetics and obesity

Recent research has found that early epigenetic nutrition memory could program a person for obesity later in life and that a network of imprinted genes could act as a switch between lean and fat body types. This triggers a life-long, epigenetically-driven decision resulting in a stable phenotype of either lean or obese. Another study suggests that the metabolic consequences of mom and dad’s dietary habits can be inherited by their kids via epigenetic mechanisms, possibly setting them up for obesity or type 2 diabetes when they grow older.

While many past studies have implied that