a linear fashion between 5.5 and 9.5 pounds, but started to increase again as birth weight rose above 9.5 pounds.
How the first nine months shapes the rest of your life
Over the last 25 years, Barker’s original work has been reproduced and expanded. If you do a quick search on Pubmed.org for “developmental origins of disease”, you’ll find references to the fetal origins of cancer, heart disease, allergies, asthma, autoimmune disease, diabetes, obesity, mental illness and degenerative conditions like arthritis, osteoporosis, dementia and Alzheimer’s.
The following list is just a small sampling of the literature on the subject:
- The metabolic syndrome. In a 2011 paper, Bruce et al showed that the onset of metabolic syndrome is “increasingly likely following exposure to suboptimal nutrition during critical periods of development”.
- Heart disease and diabetes. In 2002, Barker, the father of the DOHaD hypothesis, published a paper suggesting that slow growth during fetal life and infancy – itself a consequence of poor maternal nutrition – predisposes individuals to coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and hypertension later in life.
- Breast cancer. Hilakivi-Clarke, et al . “Thus, maternal diet and environmental exposure might increase the risk of breast cancer by inducing permanent epigenetic changes in the fetus that alter the susceptibility to factors that can initiate breast cancer.”
- Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Dumesic et al 2007. This paper suggested that insulin resistance and resulting increases of testosterone during pregnancy promotes PCOS during adulthood.
- Obesity. Kalliomaki et al 2008. These researchers found that simply by studying the composition of the maternal gut flora (influenced by nutrition, medications, stress, etc.) they could predict which children will be overweight by age 7!
Why does Mom’s diet play such a crucial role in determining our future health?
The idea that the nutritional, hormonal and metabolic environment provided by the mother permanently programs the structure and physiology of her offspring was established by Barker back in the 80s.
Essentially, it works like this. Like all living beings in their early lives, humans are able to adapt to their environment. If we couldn’t, we would die. There is a critical period early in life where that adaptation happens, and once that period passes, we become less “plastic” and able to adapt. Our programming is set.
For humans, that critical period when a system is plastic and sensitive to its environment occurs in utero. This makes perfect sense in evolutionary terms. It enables the production of genetic phenotypes that make us better matched to the environment we are likely find ourselves in after we’re born.
For example, if the mother’s nutritional status is poor during pregnancy, the fetus might develop metabolic adaptations that would allow it to store more calories (the “thrifty phenotype” hypothesis). This would have been a protective mechanism that could increase the chances of survival if that fetus was born into an environment where calories were scarce.
Gluckman et al extended this concept of developmental plasticity by showing that fetal programming operates across the range from undernutrition to overnutrition with a U-shaped curve. This means that the future health of the baby will be affected when Mom gets either too little of the right nutrients or too much of the wrong ones.
Roseboom et al found that undernutrition during pregnancy affects different organs of the body and increases the risk of disease independent of birth weight. Other researchers have theorized that maternal diet may regulate blood flow to developing organs (i.e. to the brain vs. the liver) which in turn causes changes in fetal programming that affect body composition at birth and even later in life.
The nutritional conditions in the womb start before conception
We’ve now established that the nutritional environment of a mother’s womb affects her baby’s health not only at birth and during early infancy, but for the rest of his or her life. This leads us