Hormonal
Adverse intrauterine environments, including maternal malnutrition, high-fat diets, and obesity, program the offspring's metabolism to increase the risk of adult metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease through structural, epigenetic, and hormonal changes.
Your metabolic health is heavily influenced by your mother's health during pregnancy, not just your own diet today. While you cannot change your prenatal history, understanding this link highlights the importance of prenatal care and suggests that maintaining a healthy lifestyle post-birth is critical to mitigating programmed risks, even if it doesn't fully reverse them.
This hypothesis has been continually supported by epidemiologic studies and studies involving animal models. In this review, we describe the structural, metabolic and epigenetic changes that occur in response to adverse intrauterine environments including prenatal and postnatal diet, maternal obesity, and pregnancy complications.
Why this rating
Strong support from multiple epidemiological cohorts (Dutch famine, ALSPAC) and consistent animal models, though human mechanistic data is often inferred from animal studies.
Source
Epigenetic and developmental influences on the risk of obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome
Kelli K. Ryckman et al. · Diabetes Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity · 2015
DOI 10.2147/dmso.s61296
More from this paper
- Maternal high-fat diet and obesity during pregnancy program offspring leptin resistance and altered adiponectin levels, leading to increased adiposity and insulin resistance in the offspring regardless of postnatal diet.Good
- Pregnancy complications such as gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) increase the offspring's risk of adult hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome through epigenetic modifications and endothelial dysfunction.Good
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