Towards the end of World War II, a German blockade coupled with a severe winter led to a devastating famine in the Netherlands known as the Hongerwinter. Forced to live on fewer than 800 calories a day, around 20,000 people are believed to have died.
At the same time, Leningrad was coming to the end of a drawn out and deadly siege. An estimated 800,000 civilians died as a result of the ensuing famine.
The 'hunger tours' during the Hongerwinter (Nationaal Archief)
The 'hunger tours' during the Hongerwinter (Nationaal Archief)
Decades later, a startling difference emerged between the children – now adults – born from women pregnant during these terrible conditions. The Dutch survivors experienced an increased risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease; those from Leningrad did not.
These very different outcomes tell us something important about what happens in the womb during pregnancy, says Professor Abby Fowden from the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.
“The fetus is programmed for the environment in which it expects to find itself. Most of the time, if what it has predicted in the womb ends up being what it experiences after birth, its future health is likely to reflect that of the general population. But what if there’s a mismatch? That’s when more health problems than average can arise in later life.”
Babies from the famines would have been undernourished; they would have been born smaller, their bodies programmed for a world where food was scarce. For the Leningrad babies, food was scare: the famine lasted several years. In the Netherlands, however, food supplies returned to normal much quicker.
Just as diet, smoking and exercise affect our health as adults, so too can they affect the unborn baby while it is in the womb. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the environment of these earliest months of life can also affect our long-term health, and even the health of our grandchildren.
