As an athlete, I would say my diet for the most part has to be healthy but I also love eating healthy. My downfall is that I absolutely love sweets, and the cravings definitely get worse if I’m sad or stressed. I’m not big into fried foods, but I love all carbs. I think the most predominant food eating habit in my family is a sweet tooth. My mom is big into sweets and has a dessert with almost all of her dinners. When our whole family gets together for holidays, the most important thing to the family is the quality of the dessert bar… It’s insane.
All in all, it really terrifies me that our gut bacteria is inherited from our immediate family. Although I love sweets, I am terrified that my children could be genetically predisposed to obtaining the same love for sugar as well. This mostly terrifies me because I read an article that talks about how sugar in excess can lower the quality and amount of short-chain fatty acids in your gut, which in turn lowers the diversity of your gut microbiome. The article also mentions how the short-chain fatty acids in your gut work to prevent obesity, protecting against colorectal cancer, fighting metabolic syndrome, and controlling your gut barrier function. So after all of my research, I realize how important SCFA are to gut microbiome health. In short, my stress and emotion induced sugar cravings have a huge impact on the production and quality of SCFA in my children and so on. In order to combat some of the damage sugar does, I could start taking probiotics or eat foods with probiotics to promote gut bacteria growth and variance.
In regards to alcohol, the information provided on the forum was very interesting. From what I was able to grasp, when alcohol is broken down, acetate is formed as a byproduct and is significant because of its ability to add acetyl groups to histones. With the mice for example, when they consume alcohol, their histones acetylate which can alter gene expression and form cravings for alcohol in their genome. From my understanding, this is also true for humans and our cravings. Since these cravings not only affect me but are also passed from generation to generation, I will try to be conscious and intentional with my drinking and food consumption decisions. In short, it seems like if I try to do my best by leading a healthy lifestyle, my progeny may be better off.
NCBI (February 17, 2016) Intestinal Short Chain Fatty Acids and their Link with Diet and Human Health. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4756104/