New Delhi: When it comes to the health of offspring, it’s usually the mother who receives the focus about what to eat as well as what to avoid in the environment before and during pregnancy.

But a recent Canadian study found that a father’s diet before conception could carry just as much weight with regard to a child’s well-being.

A father’s diet before sex can play as important a role as nutrition of the expectant mother in delivering a healthy baby, new research suggests. “We were really surprised,” said Michal Polak, a Professor at the University of Cincinnati in the US. “In many species, the moms do a lot of the care. So we expect there to be an effect of maternal diet on offspring because of that strong link. But it was a real surprise to find a link between paternal diet and offspring,” Polak said.

For the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers manipulated the nutrition of male fruit flies and observed a strong correlation between poor diet and poor survivorship among their offspring. Scientists regularly study fruit flies because they share 60 per cent of our genes and more than 75 per cent of our disease genes.

The researchers fed females the same diet. But they fed males 30 different diets of yeast and sugars. The flies could eat all they wanted from the agar mixture in the bottom of their glass beaker homes, but the quality of the food varied dramatically from low to high concentrations of proteins, carbohydrates and calories.

After 17 days on the strict diet, the males were mated individually and consecutively with two females, which all received the same diet of yeasted cornmeal. The researchers found that embryos from the second mating were more likely to survive as their fathers’ diets improved in nutrition.

These effects were less apparent in the first mating. Likewise, embryo mortality was highest for offspring of males that fed on a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet. The study also found a slightly higher incidence of embryo mortality associated with male flies in the first mating that was fed the highest-calorie diet.