Poor diet during pregnancy increases offspring's vulnerability to the effects of aging, new research has shown for the first time.
The research, by scientists from the University of Cambridge, provides important insight into why children born to mothers who consumed an unhealthy diet during pregnancy have an increased risk of type 2 diabetes (a significant contributing factor to heart disease and cancer) later in life.
"What is most exciting about these findings is that we are now starting to really understand how nutrition during the first nine months of life spent in the womb shape our long term health by influencing how the cells in our body age," said Dr Susan Ozanne, the senior author on the paper and British Heart Foundation Senior Fellow from the Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge.
Are you out of your mind. Fat kids are fat because:
Input - Output = Net Accumulation
That's it folks, and mom just fed the little tubby too much. Have you ever heard of mom feeding junior another cookie. Monty Python in a file The Facts of Life had the glutton in the one more mint scene. That is all there is. Perhaps they should show this at Cambridge!
They continue:
To test their theory, the researchers used a well-established rat model where, by altering the protein content of the mother's diet during pregnancy, the offspring develop type 2 diabetes in old age.
First, they studied the RNA from insulin secreting cells in the pancreas from offspring of normally fed as well as malnourished mothers in young adult life and in old age. When they compared the two, they found that there was a significant decrease in the expression of the Hnf4a gene in the offspring prone to type 2 diabetes. The expression of Hnf4a also decreased with age in both groups.
Second, they studied the DNA and found that the decrease of Hnf4a was caused by epigenetic changes. The age associated epigenetic silencing was more pronounced in rats exposed to poor maternal diet. They concluded that the epigenetic changes resulting from maternal diet and aging lead to the reduced expression of the Hnf4a gene, decreasing the function of the pancreas and therefore its ability to make insulin (and thereby increasing the risk of diabetes).
These are rats, with no will power, conditioned rats! Get the fat guy in Monty Python to just shut his mouth before he explodes. Oh well, maybe that is why everyone is ballooning out! See my book (draft) on Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes, worth a peek.
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