Evidence that the problem of obesity starts in the womb

IN THE late 1980s David Barker, a British doctor, suggested that what a woman eats when she is pregnant shapes her child’s physiology for life. He called the idea fetal programming. Such programming would allow an individual to make optimum use of available nutrients, on the assumption that his own diet will be similar to his mother’s. If it was not similar, though, there could be problems. Dr Barker speculated that fetal programming—in mesalliance with the spread of fatty, sugary foods over recent decades—might explain the epidemic of obesity, heart disease and late-onset diabetes that plagues many rich countries.

It is a neat theory, but hard to prove. On October 29th, though, Sir Peter Gluckman, an endocrinologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, presented evidence to support it at a conference organised in Lausanne by Nestle, a Swiss food company. Dr Gluckman carried out his study in Jamaica, in collaboration with Terrence Forrester, of the University of the West Indies. He picked Jamaica because malnutrition is endemic there. That allows the theory of fetal programming to be tested by finding out whether those who experienced malnutrition in the womb respond differently to food than those who were properly fed. …