Pregnant women know not to smoke, but do they know they should eat apples and basil, oregano, rosemary, sage, and thyme? Not just for their own health, or their unborn’s health, but also for their grandchild’s health.
While investigating brain nerve cells, which communicate and connect through axons–about 850,000 kilometers worth of them–senior author Professor Roger Pocock and his team at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia questioned:
- How to explore maternal provisioning to offspring, and multigenerational inheritance
- Can natural products might stabilize axons to lessen or prevent breakage
- How the natural plant product ursolic acid provides neuroprotection, reducing the fragility of axons
In the study, published in Nature CellBiology, researchers state:
- “feeding Caenorhabditis elegans [roundworm] with ursolic acid…improves axon transport and reduces adult-onset axon fragility intergenerationally”
- “Ursolic acid provides neuroprotection by enhancing maternal provisioning of sphingosine-1-phosphate, a bioactive sphingolipid”
- “Intestine-to-oocyte sphingosine-1-phosphate transfer is required for intergenerational neuroprotection and is dependent on the RME-2 lipoprotein yolk receptor.”
They conclude that “our study reveals that a short-term dietary supplement during the maternal reproductive period can be neuroprotective over multiple generations—providing a paradigm for intergenerational inheritance of health-promoting traits. We propose that intergenerational regulation of metabolism and metabolic gene expression is a universal principle underlying intergenerational inheritance across evolution.” Results will need to be confirmed in humans.