Nutrition before birth, programming and the perpetuation of social inequalities in health

Abstract

The need to explain social inequalities in health has led to the theory that chronic disease is due, in part, to a legacy of adverse experiences in early life. Epidemiological studies show consistently that individuals who are small at birth have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in adulthood. There is growing consensus that this association reflects a causal relationship and is not simply the product of bias or confounding. The concept of programming is invoked as the biological mechanism; birth size is thus a proxy for fetal programming. Recent findings suggest that fetal programming interacts with the post-birth environment. The adverse exposures that are thought to underlie and potentiate programming cluster in socially patterned ways, thus creating substantial inequalities in health. Experiments in animals demonstrate that nutritional interventions before or during pregnancy can produce programming phenomena in the offspring, sometimes without an impact on birth size. However, the extent to which maternal nutrition contributes to programming in contemporary developed countries is uncertain.