A useful mantra for pregnant women is “your baby is what you eat”. And a new study brings this home, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, US.
They’ve shown, as early as the fifth month of pregnancy, that a mother’s fat metabolism (proxy for what she eats) affects foetal growth and then tracks newborn growth, adiposity and development into childhood.
The study followed 3,500 babies and their mothers, in six countries, from early pregnancy to childhood, and showed early on that the mother’s blood fat levels influenced the growth of the unborn baby.
