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There is a growing body of evidence that a mother's metabolic status during gestation affects her offspring's risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life. This observation is often referred to as "The Barker Hypothesis" after David Barker, a researcher and physician who has done considerable work in this area. Obviously, the metabolism of the mother is greatly influenced by her diet and a growing literature is documenting the associations between maternal diet during gestation and disease risk in offsrping.
As more and more evidence accummulates to support the notion that subtle variations in gestational development that are modulated by maternal diet significantly affect the future health of offspring, our attitudes (and possibly policy and practice) toward these first months of existence may need to be re-examined. This is clearly an area of research to watch, especially in the context of an aging population and growing concern about chronic disease risk at the personal, community and population levels. This is a public health issue.
The subject of this entry describes a recent report that links maternal diet to the future risk of breast cancer in offspring and begins to describe the molecular mechanisms that may be responsible.
A new report (Yu B, Khan G, Foxworth A, Huang K, Hilakivi-Clarke L. Int J Cancer. 2006 Nov 15;119(10):2279-86) presents data to support the authors' observation that a diet of whole wheat during pregnancy significantly lowers the risk of breast cancer in the offspring later in life. The expression of several genes seem to be affected by the inclusion of whole wheat in the mother rats' diet, including several genes that are known to be associated with breast cancer risk in humans. This observation is being interpreted to suggest that these offspring may be better able to deal with carcinogenic environmental insults than those whose mothers did not have a diet in whole wheat during their gestation. Interestingly, the observation seems to be confined only to whole wheat since ingesting other grains during pregnancy did not affect breast cancer risk for offspring.
The full report can be found in the International Journal of Cancer
The Pub Med entry is here.
Comments
Well that is just great. I told my wife she needed more whole grain in her diet when she was pregnant ...
Posted by: True Diet Reviews | June 17, 2008 2:28 PM