Why you’ll live longer if your mother ate lots of beans

YOU Are what you eat, goes the saying. But perhaps more apt would be: you are what your mother ate. For there is growing evidence that bad dietary habits of mothers-to-be — while pregnant or even before they conceive — can condemn their children to a lifetime of health problems.

A new study has suggested that women who drink at least one artificially sweetened drink a day double their offspring’s risk of being overweight in early childhood. The babies were not heavier when born, suggesting that the effect is on postnatal growth, not in the womb.

The Minnesota University study of more than 3,000 mothers and their children, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, says further research is needed to explain why artificial sweeteners may have this effect.

Another recent study suggested that drinking large amounts of fructose — a common sweetener in food and fizzy drinks — during pregnancy could raise a child’s risk of obesity, high blood pressure and other factors linked to heart disease.

This effect was more pronounced in female offspring, said the researchers, whose study of mice was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

And it’s not just the mother’s habits that can have an impact. Yesterday, a review in the American Journal of Stem Cells suggested that a father’s age and lifestyle can lead to genetic changes in the foetus which cause birth defects.

In particular, fathers who regularly drank alcohol were more likely to have newborns with a lower birth weight and impaired cognitive function, even if the mother didn’t drink at all.

These are just the latest in a series of studies linking maternal — and, in some cases, paternal — diet to babies’ long-term health.

LOOK OLD? MAYBE MUM NEEDED MORE APPLES

The speed at which our bodies age through adulthood is actually determined in our mother’s womb, according to a new study by developmental scientists at Cambridge University.

The level of antioxidants in the mother’s diet plays a crucial role. Antioxidants are chemicals that can prevent or slow damage to cells caused by free radicals (corrosive molecules produced by our bodies, which we also breathe in from polluted air and smoking).

The foods richest in antioxidants include beans, berries, apples and plums.

The Cambridge scientists compared the lifespans of baby rats bred from mothers that during their pregnancy were fed a diet either high in antioxidants or containing none.

The rats born to the antioxidant-fed mothers aged more slowly in adulthood.

The rate at which our bodies age depends on how rapidly our telomeres wear out.

These are found at the ends of each of our chromosomes, which carry our DNA. They act in a similar way to the plastic bits on the ends of shoelaces, preventing the chromosomes from fraying.

As we age, these telomeres become shorter, our DNA becomes unstable and its ability to produce healthily youthful tissue diminishes. In particular, this can raise our risk of heart disease.

The new study showed that in the rats born to mothers which didn’t get antioxidants, the rate of telomere wear was significantly more rapid.

As the lead researcher, Dino Giussani, a professor of developmental cardiovascular physiology and medicine, explains: ‘Our study suggests the ageing clock begins ticking even before we are born, which may surprise many people.’

FATTY FOOD LINK TO DEPRESSION

There may be pressure on women not to pile on too many pounds during pregnancy, but eating too little can affect their child’s mental and physical well-being, research has suggested. About a quarter of UK mothers-to-be were ‘highly concerned about their weight and shape’ during pregnancy, according to a 2013 study by Nadia Micali, a psychiatrist at University College London’s Institute of Child health.

She asked more than 700 women to fill in questionnaires at their first routine scan and concluded that one in 14 displayed the symptoms of an eating disorder, such as severe dietary restrictions or bingeing, then making themselves sick.

In previous research, Dr Micali found that women with any history of eating problems before or during their pregnancy had babies that weighed, on average, 200g less.

She warns: ‘Low birth weight is associated with neurological and physical impairments that are often identified at a later stage in the child’s life. Depression, attention problems, schizophrenia and eating disorders have all been linked.’

Low birth weight is also linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, cerebral palsy, and visual and hearing impairments. Too much junk food can have a similar effect.

Mothers who mainly ate foods high in saturated fat and sugar were more likely to go into labour prematurely — and, therefore, to have underweight, underdeveloped babies — according to a study published in the Journal of Nutrition last year.

VITAMINS ALTER BABY’S GENES

The effect of the mother’s diet seems to come down to how nutrients — or lack of them — affect which genes are switched on and off during foetal development. research has found that babies born in conditions of severe famine are more prone to problems such as heart disease and diabetes.

One theory is that their bodies are ‘taught’ in the womb to expect a lifetime of famine, so their metabolisms are configured to put on weight easily, in order to cope.

Now research from the London School of hygiene & Tropical Medicine has found differences in how gene activity is altered by the presence or absence of key nutrients.

The scientists looked at the genes of more than 160 babies born in Gambia, comparing those conceived during the rainy season, when food is scarce, with those conceived in the dry season, when it is plentiful.

They studied a process called methylation, where gene activity is either altered or ‘silenced’ before babies are born.

There were major differences in the genes, depending on the presence of key nutrients such as folate, vitamins B2, B6 and B12 in the babies’ blood.

DIET CAN PASS ON DIABETES RISK

MOTHERS who habitually eat high-fat diets can pass on the physical damage — in the form of diabetes — through their eggs, according to German research published earlier this year. The researchers say high-fat diets change our DNA by altering chemicals surrounding our genes, known as the ‘epigene’. These genetic changes can then be passed on to the next generation via eggs.

The risk is also raised if men eat high-fat diets, passing on the damage via their sperm.

To demonstrate this, scientists from the German Centre for Diabetes research took eggs and sperm from mice that were obese from being fed high-fat diets and had subsequently become diabetic, and created embryos using IVF.

These embryos were then implanted in the wombs of mice that were a healthy weight (to ensure it wasn’t the obese mothers’ bodies that were altering the babies’ genes in the womb).

The offspring were at far greater than normal risk of developing diabetes. Female babies were more likely to become severely obese, while the males were very prone to high blood sugar levels, a risk factor for diabetes, according to the journal Nature Genetics.

Martin hrabe de Angelis, the professor of experimental genetics who led the study, suggests: ‘This kind of epigenetic inheritance due to an unhealthy diet could be another major cause of the dramatic increase in diabetes worldwide.’

he adds that the research indicates that such damage can be prevented or reversed if parents change their diets before they start a family.

MORE PEANUTS, FEWER ALLERGIES

ArOUND 44 per cent of British mothers avoid eating peanuts while they are pregnant, according to a major study that is following 12,000 children from before birth through their lives.

The study, part of the Integrated Approaches to Food Allergen and Allergy Management project (iFAAM), is monitoring how diet — including the mother’s during pregnancy — affects a child’s risk of having allergies.

The practice of avoiding peanuts seems to be driven by outdated health advice that expectant women should avoid nuts to prevent allergies in their children.

This advice has since been reversed. It is now thought that early exposure can pre-set children’s immune systems to accept peanut proteins as beneficial, instead of rejecting them as foreign.

And it’s not just peanuts — very early exposure to other potential allergens also teaches baby’s immune system to accept these items as friendly.

For instance, U.S. researchers found that regular consumption of milk in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy was associated with a 17 per cent reduction in the chance of childhood asthma developing.

GRANNY’S DIET MATTERS, TOO

eATING for two may also mean eating for two generations, according to research in the journal Cell Metabolism.

Mice that are malnourished during pregnancy give birth to underweight offspring, then become obese and diabetic as they age, Spanish scientists have reported.

They discovered that these genetic changes were subsequently passed on to the next generation of mice, which also grew up to be overweight.