A diet for a lifetime.

Professor David Barker, head of the M.R.C.'s Environmental Epidemiology Research Unit at the University of Southampton, believes that maternal diet and nutrition during pregnancy has an enormous influence upon the health, stature and longevity of offspring and even grandchildren. These conclusions are based in part on analysis of early twentieth-century public health, census and hospital records from Hertfordshire and Preston and on the medical histories of children born in The Netherlands after the near-famine of 1944-45. Diseases believed to bear a close relation to maternal nutrition during pregnancy include heart disease and late-onset diabetes.