For all the mothers to be...Study links mom's diet, your life span

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This is interesting...

Study links mom's diet, your life span

Wednesday, January 28, 2004 Posted: 1:03 PM EST (1803 GMT)

(AP) -- Experiments with mice suggest that life span may be related

to what your mother ate during pregnancy.

The new study at Cambridge University in England shows that pregnant

mice fed a well-balanced diet had babies that lived longer, healthier

lives. Mice that were undernourished in the womb and ate a poor diet

as adults died prematurely.

Researchers caution the mouse results cannot be directly applied to

human health. But they said the results published in Thursday's issue

of the journal Nature bolster the notion that low-birth weight babies

are more likely to develop life-threatening cardiovascular disease

and other illnesses as they mature.

" Growth during prenatal life has a very powerful impact on

longevity, " said Kent Thornburg, a fetal physiologist at Oregon

Health Sciences University who did not contribute to the new study.

However, other researchers said they remain unconvinced.

Huxley of the Institute for International Health in Sydney,

Australia, said a mother's diet is likely to have very little effect

on how long her offspring lives when compared to known health risks

in adulthood, such as cigarette smoking.

" Even if a causal association could be demonstrated between diet in

early life and longevity, its actual influence is likely to be small

when compared with known environmental determinants of longevity, "

Huxley said.

Pregnant mice in the study were fed either a protein-rich diet or a

low-protein regimen. After the babies were born, researchers swapped

the mothers so that undernourished babies were nursed by mothers on a

standard diet to catch up on their growth, and vice versa.

The control animals had mothers that were fed a standard diet and

they nursed normally after they were born. They lived for about two

years.

Mice that were well-nourished in the womb lived on average two months

longer than the control group, the researchers reported. The mice

that were undernourished in the womb died six months earlier than the

control group.

In a second round of experiments, half of the babies from each litter

were weaned at 21 days on a high-calorie, high-sugar diet, similar to

a diet that contributes to obesity in humans. The rest were fed a

standard diet.

Mice that had poor maternal nutrition in the womb and weaned on the

unhealthy diet survived only a year, or about half as long as other

mice in the study.

The high-calorie diet did not have a noticeable effect on the life

span of well-fed mice weaned on a restricted diet after birth, the

researchers reported.

In the late 1980s, Barker of the University of Southampton in

England published research demonstrating that low-birth weight babies

are more likely to develop heart disease and high blood pressure in

later stages of life, leading some scientists to believe that poor

nutrition in the womb restricts the normal fetal development.

In the latest study, the Cambridge researchers suspected that the

mice may have permanently increased appetite when forced to catch up

on nutrients after birth. Critical organs such as the kidneys may

also be damaged in cases where mice are not given the necessary

nutrition in the womb, they said.

Over a lifetime -- seven or eight decades in the case of humans --

those differences become magnified, they suggested.

" There is, after all, a significant difference between living to be

50 years old and reaching the age of 75, " the researchers wrote in

Nature.