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Poor Health Due To Improper Food Intake May Pass on To Future Generations

by Julia Samuel on Aug 8 2017 9:57 AM

Poor Health Due To Improper Food Intake May Pass on To Future Generations
Nutrition interventions that target poor populations sometimes fail to show an immediate impact. In a venture to find out the possible reasons, Andrew M. Prentice professor within the MRC Unit The Gambia and MRC International Nutrition Group with his colleagues conducted a study.
The findings come from an experiment of nature in rural Gambia that ruled out confounding socioeconomic factors that could influence babies' growth across generations.

Results show that parents' own prenatal environment has a detectable impact on their children's weight.

"Nutritional interventions such as dietary supplementation programs in poor populations are frequently undermined by an apparent absence of immediate impact," said Andrew M. Prentice.

"This study shows that it may take several generations to eliminate growth failure and stunting because of these intergenerational influences."

Researchers exploited an experiment of nature in rural Gambia, where a single annual rainy season creates a harvest and a hungry season. Mothers for whom the latter part of pregnancy is in the hungry season tend to have smaller babies.

The knowledge that mothers and fathers born in the hungry season were nutritionally stressed in utero allowed researchers to study how parents' own fetal nutrition affects the growth of their offspring.

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With a Gambian cohort of infants born between 1972 and 2011, the team used 31 multiple regression to test whether parental season of birth predicted offspring birth weight, length, and/or height by the time they were 2 years old.

"Here we have an unfortunate climatological situation being productively mined for hopeful future intervention" said Thoru Pederson, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal.

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Source-Eurekalert


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