Could our diet while growing up affect our offspring's vitality?

You are what you eat - and so are your offspring. And in the title bout featuring protein versus sugar, protein is the winner.

That's what a researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) found while studying the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as part of a multi-institutional team. In a finding that may have application to human beings, the scientists discovered that a larval diet that's predominantly protein is better than a diet of sugar when it comes to the reproduction and development of the next generation of the small flies, which count humanlike metabolism among their many biological similarities.

The scientists adjusted the proportion of yeast to sugar in the flies' diet to devise protein-rich or sugar-rich food sources. Comparing both diets, the researchers discovered that mother flies that grew as larvae on a protein diet had greater fecundity and offspring possessing greater metabolic reserves than females grown as larvae on a diet that was predominantly sugar.

"We definitely saw a significant effect," said Dr. Luciano Matzkin, assistant professor and director of the graduate program in the UAH Department of Biological Sciences. "We saw that maternal larval diets higher in protein increased the overall fecundity of the adult mother, the number of eggs she produced, and also had a beneficial effect on the next generation, the F1 generation of offspring." When researchers returned F1 larvae to a typical banana puree lab diet fed to fruit flies, it did not change the beneficial effects that the maternal larval protein diet had conferred on the F1 generation.