Fetal Programming and the Metabolic Syndrome

A very technical review paper on Epigenomics from the journal Diabetes looks at how a mother's diet at certain stages of prenatal development can adversely affect gene expression, ultimately leading to the Metabolic Syndrome in her offspring.

The effect is passed on through future generations, indicating that a grandmother's nutritional status, in particular periconceptually and throughout pregnancy and lactation, can have a lasting effect on future granchildren's health.

Good maternal nutrition increasingly looks like having significant and ever more far-reaching effects.