Obesity Predisposition Starts in the Mother’s Womb

You fail to lose weight? This can be explained by a number of reasons: laziness, wrong method, self-deception or… genetics. If you have a problem, it is unlikely that you thought the tendency for obesity to have been programmed at the stage of your development in the womb. It has been proved now.

It is believed that the mother’s lifestyle before and during pregnancy can affect the health of the child in the long run. Her diet, the air that she breathes, alcohol, smoking – all of this can cause irreversible changes in the DNA of her unborn child. Metaphorically speaking, if we imagine that the first letters and words appear in the book of the child’s future life during pregnancy, they will remain unchanged. What can be changed is the punctuation, as the Daily Mail magazine writes.

Thus, the scientists from Newcastle University have proved that obesity predisposition may develop at the stage of fetus formation. The researchers analyzed blood samples of the children aged 9 to 11 years (the samples had been taken at birth). In particular, they were looking for genes that had the same sequence, but “behaved” differently in people with normal weight and overweight. It was found that DNA markers in obese children were different as early as at birth.

In their study, the researchers relied on the methods of epigenetics (which is yet a controversial science), studying changes in gene expression and cell phenotype caused by the mechanisms that do not involve changes in DNA sequence.