Start early: Preventing obesity, promoting health

The current obesity epidemic is clearly only in part of genetic origin, but unfavourable changes in environment and lifestyle that cause obesity and associated disorders remain elusive. Nutrition during early years has an important impact on later health, and might correlate with obesity risk.

An ongoing 5-year EU-funded project, EARLYNUTRITION (Long-term effects of early nutrition on later health), is investigating this correlation on a collection of several cohorts of 470 000 individuals. The study populations include women before pregnancy, pregnant women, infants and young children. Alongside epidemiological and interventional approaches, advanced methods of bioinformatics, epigenetics and metabolomics are providing information also at the cellular and molecular levels.

The project is analysing the mechanisms for early nutrition programming by following up on human cohorts in childhood, adolescence and adulthood as one of the focus areas. For instance, new evidence reveals that greater childhood adiposity is associated with maternal vitamin D insufficiency and with low levels of activity in children.

EARLYNUTRITION linked maternal dietary glycaemic load in early (but not late) pregnancy with childhood adiposity. Greater abdominal circumference gain during early infancy was found to correlate with higher childhood blood pressure. Currently analysed data from major cohorts will establish the long-term effects of maternal pregnancy weight gain, body composition and smoking on offspring adiposity/co-morbidities.

Data from animal models and placental samples are also being collected and analysed. Thus, in vitro studies in perfused placentas are providing insights into biological mechanisms of fatty acid transport. A difference in target gene expression in human and animal placentas from obese compared to lean mothers is analysed using a microarray approach. In rodents, maternal obesity is associated with abnormal glucose homeostasis. New data suggests maternal dietary and exercise interventions can favourably influence the phenotype of their offspring.

Current recommendations for pregnant and particularly obese women and for young children do not take into account the long-term health consequences of nutrition. EARLYNUTRITION is reviewing the evidence to optimise recommendations on nutrition before and during pregnancy, the breastfeeding period and childhood, with special reference to later health development. Current recommendations and latest research findings are furthermore translated into practical application by the Early Nutrition eAcademy, an e-learning platform conceptualized for the continuing medical education of international health care professionals. State of the art research in the field and project achievements will be presented at the second EarlyNutrition conference in October 2016, The Power of Programming 2016.