Why Eating Badly When You Are Pregnant Could Harm Your Grandchildren's Health

Eating badly during pregnancy may not just affect a woman’s child – it could harm her grandchildren as well.

Research suggests that pregnant women who under-eat create a heightened risk of diabetes and obesity for their descendants.

The study demonstrates that a ‘memory’ of nutrition is passed down between generations. If a woman does not get the food she needs during pregnancy her unborn child could be born ‘pre-programmed’ to cope with undernourishment.

It means that if the child goes on to get what the body perceives as an abundance of food, the digestive system cannot cope.

Instead of digesting the food, the body may store it as fat, and the child is put at far higher risk of developing metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes.


The research, published last night in the journal Science, establishes that undernourishment during pregnancy can cause subtle alterations to the unborn baby’s genes.

Those ‘epigenetic’ changes can then be passed on to the next generation, increasing the chance of health problems for the grandchildren as well.

The research, which was carried out in mice, suggests the impact of undernourishment will not be passed on indefinitely, but could go through three generations – from mother, to child, to grandchild.