Underweight at birth, followed by an unhealthy adult lifestyle is diabetes risk

The comments are based on a new study that unfolds the fact that combination of low weight at birth, and unhealthy adult lifestyle poses greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Participants, who were monitored closely for the study, were scored on the 5-points lifestyle index including, diet, smoking, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and body mass index.

A total number of 149,794 healthy men and women tracked under three large ongoing trials. Factually, it has become clinically evident as a part of the study, that 22 percent of these cases could be attributed to a lower birth weight alone, 59 percent to unhealthy lifestyle alone, and 18 percent to the interaction between both factors.

As reported by ANI,

The researchers suggest that poor nourishment in pregnant women may cause the fetus to prepare for survival in a resource-scarce environment. When the adaptive response to prenatal starvation is mismatched with exposure to an affluent environment later in life, it could highten the risk of type 2 diabetes in adulthood.

Yanping Li, a research scientist in the Department of Nutrition, said that their findings suggested that the public health consequences of unhealthy lifestyles would be larger in low birth weight populations.

This was of critical importance in the developing countries undergoing rapid epidemiologic transition from traditional to Western lifestyles, such as China and India, where cigarette smoking, sedentary activities, obesity, and diabetes has been increasing dramatically, and low birth weight is still highly prevalent.

The findings are published in the online journal BMJ Open