Month: March 2016

A crummy diet can obviously have a lasting impact on the waistline—but for parents, it may also have a lasting impact on DNA and the family line, a new study suggests.

Compared with skinny mice on a standard or low-fat diet, genetically similar mice that became obese on a high-fat, high-calorie diet were more likely to have obese offspring at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. While researchers have noted such a familial influence on metabolic disorders before, the new study took the extra steps of producing the pups by in vitro fertilization of the sperm and eggs from the obese parents, implanted in slim, surrogate mothers. This experimental setup eliminates confounding influences from mom and dad, such as chemicals in seminal fluid, molecular signals in utero, microbiome transfers, and components of breast milk.

The finding, published Monday in Nature Genetics, provides clean support for the theory that poor diet and/or obesity in parents produces epigenetic changes—chemical tags and other molecular switches of DNA that alter how the genetic code is read and translated, rather than the code itself. And those changes can get passed down to offspring and influence their metabolism and health.

Three Southern California police officers were charged Monday with theft of protein bars and cookies eaten at a medical marijuana dispensary last year. The alleged crimes by the Santa Ana Police Department (SAPD) officers were captured by secret video during a May raid of the Sky High Holistic dispensary in Santa Ana, just southeast of Los Angeles.

"The Orange County District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation conducted a thorough investigation, including interviewing multiple witnesses and reviewing over 16 hours of unedited video surveillance footage with the cooperation of SAPD," the Orange County District Attorney's Office said in a statement. "While other SAPD personnel ate some protein bars, there is insufficient evidence that they knew the food items belonged to the dispensary and not their fellow officers. There was also no evidence that any SAPD personnel consumed any edible marijuana items available at the dispensary."

Charged with misdemeanor theft were Brandon Matthew Sontag, 31, Nicole Lynn Quijas, 37, and Jorge Arroyo, 32. Sontag was also charged with vandalism, and he is accused of smashing five of the dispensary's security cameras, prosecutors said.