You may feel that your night eating is a personal problem that none of your friends and family can ever understand. Yet, you may be surprised to learn that recent research suggests that Night Eating Syndrome runs in families. This condition may actually be inherited. What does this mean for you?

Before you can understand how Night Eating Syndrome may be passed from a parent to a child, let’s refresh your understanding of the science of genetics. Early attempts to figure out the role of heredity in humans include reports from about 500 A.D. in the authoritative book of Jewish tradition, the Talmud. There is a description in the Talmud of the bleeding disorder, hemophilia, which, it was noted, ran in families. Despite this and other rare examples, most of what was known about human heredity was highly speculative until recent times.

An Eye for an Eye; A Pea for a Pea
A basic understanding of heredity remained elusive until 1866, when the studies of the Moravian monk, Gregor Mendel, were published. That publication ushered in our modern understanding of genetics. Yet, at the time, his research attracted little or no attention, because it seemed far removed from practical applications to human disease. Why was there such lack of interest? Perhaps because Mendel’s study participants were garden peas.

Although Mendel’s research was with plants, the basic underlying principles of heredity that he discovered also apply to people and other animals because the mechanisms of heredity are essentially the same for all complex life forms. You may have a vague recollection of this research from your high school freshman biology course.

Among Mendel’s key findings was the discovery of the laws governing the color of peas produced by crossing peas of two different colors. He demonstrated that the color of the peas resulting from crossing yellow peas with green peas was not an in-between shade, as you might expect. Instead, all of the first generation of these crosses were of the same color, yellow. Then, when he crossed the second generation yellow peas with each other, Mendel discovered that the original green reappeared in some of the peas of the third generation.

Eventually, this result led to our current knowledge of dominant and recessive genes. Mendel explained his findings by proposing that yellow was the dominant color, while green was recessive. He proposed the theory that each individual pea possesses two factors that determine a specific characteristic such as color, and that each parent transmits only one of these two factors to any particular offspring. It took many years before the significance of these factors became known. But they are recognized today as genes, the agents responsible for the transmission of all heritable characteristics from parents to children.

Think of these findings in terms of human eye color. As with the yellow peas, the gene for brown eyes is dominant. Say, for example, your mother has brown eyes, and your father blue. Your mother may have either two dominant genes (two brown genes), or she may have one dominant and one recessive (a brown and a blue). Your father, having blue eyes, has two recessive genes. If your mother has two dominant genes, you will have brown eyes since her gene will be dominant over the recessive gene from your father. If your mother has one dominant and one recessive gene, you have a fifty-fifty chance of having brown eyes. If your mother passes her dominant gene on to you, you will have brown eyes. If your mother passes her recessive gene on to you, when it is crossed with the recessive gene your father passed on to you, you will have blue eyes.