Why eating badly when you are pregnant could harm your grandchildren’s health
* Not eating enough during pregnancy can create heightened risk of diabetes * Study shows that ‘memory’ of nutrition can be passed between Generations * Unborn child can be put at a heightened risk of diabetes and obesity
Eating badly during pregnancy may not just affect a woman’s child – it could harm her grandchildren as well. Research suggests that pregnant women who under-eat create a heightened risk of diabetes and obesity for their descendants.
The study demonstrates that a ‘ memory’ of nutrition is passed down between generations. If a woman does not get the food she needs during pregnancy her unborn child could be born ‘preprogrammed’ to cope with undernourishment.
Pregnant women who under-eat create a heightened risk for type 2 diabetes and obesity, according to a new study
It means that if the child goes on to get what the body perceives as an abundance of food, the digestive system cannot cope.
Instead of digesting the food, the body may store it as fat, and the child is put at far higher risk of developing metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes.
The research, published last night in the journal Science, establishes that undernourishment during pregnancy can cause subtle alterations to the unborn baby’s genes.
Those ‘epigenetic’ changes can then be passed on to the next generation, increasing the chance of health problems for the grandchildren as well.
The research, which was carried out in mice, suggests the impact of undernourishment will not be passed on indefinitely, but could go through three generations – from mother, to child, to grandchild.
New test for premature births
Scientists have developed a test that could tell a mother-to-be whether their child might be born prematurely.
The urine test could be taken in the early stages of pregnancy, allowing doctors to give women the care they need to have a healthy baby.
Imperial College London researchers found that specific molecules in the urine of women after just 12 weeks of pregnancy could give an indication of whether their baby would be born early.
The scientists hope that identifying the risk factors very early on could help reduce birth complications.
The international scientific team, led by researchers at Cambridge University and Harvard Medical School in the US, think the findings may explain why type 2 diabetes has become such a big global problem.
Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, of the department of genetics at Cambridge, said: ‘When food is scarce, children may be born “preprogrammed” to cope with undernourishment.
In the event of a sudden abundance in food, their bodies cannot cope and they can develop metabolic diseases such as diabetes.
‘We need to understand how these adaptations between generations occur since they may help us understand the record levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes today.’
The researchers found that among mice male offspring of an undernourished mother were, as expected, smaller than average.
If they were fed a normal diet they went on to develop diabetes. The third generation were also born small and developed diabetes as adults, despite their own mothers never being undernourished.
Unexpectedly, however, when the researchers looked at the grandchild’s DNA, they found that the changes had disappeared, so could no longer be passed on.
Culled from Mail Online