Maternal and child under-nutrition have a life-long impact on the health and prospects of the child, potentially affecting future generations.
An international collaboration of scientists using five long-standing population studies looking at nutrition, health and human capital in developing and middle-income countries has found that the impact of malnourishment in young mothers and their babies has consequences well beyond infant health and mortality.
Conducting a review of published work combined with new data analyses on communities in Brazil, Guatemala, India, the Philippines and South Africa, the team was able to show that undernutrition was strongly associated with shorter adult height, less schooling, and reduced economic productivity. These poorer life outcomes were also often passed on from one generation to the next with the offspring of undernourished mothers also displaying low birth weight.
The team also found that lower birth weight and under-nutrition in early childhood were risk factors for high glucose concentrations, blood pressure and coronary heart disease in later life, once adult BMI and height were taken into account. This would suggest that the malnutrition suffered in the womb and as an infant could not be reversed simply by access to more food at a later stage in life.