Slaying Adult Diseases Through Early Nutrition

From Oregon Live.

"A gumshoe roams the halls up at Oregon Health & Science University, and he isn't the ghost of Columbo. Instead it's the wry professor David Barker, a physician who also is an epidemiologist and, as such, pokes around asking why disease occurs at all.

That's what led him more than two decades ago, while working in England, to round up records on more than 5,600 Englishmen and discover that those with the lowest weights at birth and one year of age also had the highest death rates from coronary heart disease. The inescapable inference was, and remains, that if you can find a way to promote pre- and post-natal growth, you just might beat heart disease as an adult.

But this qualifies as a genuine medical disturbance. It steals attention from a current orthodoxy that pushes Big Mac avoidance to the top of the list of heart-safe behaviors.

While it's true excessive dietary fat and obesity are heart enemies, it's also true, Barker and others would find, that the onset of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, renal failure and other killers are deeply influenced by nutrition in the womb and during the first year of life. He and OHSU colleagues refer to this as the "disease burden" we carry from early life forward -- no Olympic medal at age 20 inoculates against it -- and it leads an otherwise cheery Barker to say: "The war against chronic disease has been lost."

OK then. But that assertion, and the supporting evidence for it, will be argued at an international conference Sunday through Wednesday in downtown Portland on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, the field Barker and colleagues birthed. The conference is a big deal at several levels.

Oregon policymakers struggle to overhaul a health care delivery system based on the smartest orthodoxy of the day: prevention. Yet the prevention models we work toward apply mainly to lifestyle adjustment and are designed to eliminate expensive emergency room visits, all rather late if the runaway blood pressure of a 50-year-old Oregon woman started in her mother's womb or even a generation before, in her grandmother's womb. Governor-appointed committees drafting Oregon's new approach to health care should pay attention.

But Portland's obstetricians and pediatricians, especially, should tune in. Their work advising mothers of the unborn and in treating infants navigating their first year could make such a difference: to health later on, in adulthood, and to all of us who pay for a symptom-based medical system we can no longer afford.

Barker, in the style of any medical detective about to crack another case, is sanguine on the point. Chronic diseases, he says, "are not mandated in the human genome." To eliminate them, we've got to go beyond medical breakthroughs and fixing today's bad habits to view the origins of things.

"It's like climate change," he says. "You have to take the longer view."

May it not be as disputed, however, as climate change. Because the early-nutrition findings of Barker and colleagues in other specialties could be as consequential as they are, the research increasingly shows, defensible.

We just need to hear them."

You also need to hear the cries of epigenetics--simply feeding the mother better isn't going to solve anything when her eggs are pre-programmed before her own birth, and never mind the father, whose sperm is also pre-programmed in utero. If you want to instill true dietary disease prevention, you need to think three generations ahead: the GRANDPARENTS set up the genetics for the GRANDKIDS through the PARENT'S eggs and sperm. Feed the GRANDPARENTS correctly, keep feeding successive generations correctly, and you can wipe out common modern diseases in three generations. If we'd gone about rationing differently in WWII, today's population would be much different than what we're seeing today, and there'd be no need for Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other current or future health care scheme.

Once again, the government got in the way. All the decent food went to our soldiers and sailors, and we got left the starch and dairy. It continues to this day with farm subsidies, food stamp programs, WIC, and the former Food Guide pyramid-current Choose My Plate campaign.

The war against chronic disease has been lost? To me, it hasn't even begun, because so many refuse to see the simple, elegant light at the end of the tunnel. As usual, politics gets in the way--notice the Oregon scientists went to England looking for their clues...both are rabid bastions of "progressive" liberalism (and I fail to see the progress). They could've stayed right here and watched the PBS series "Ghost in Your Genes."

No wonder college costs so much! So much is wasted on needless travel for information that already exists to the point of documentary-production. NOW who needs to hear?

You want to do some disease-slaying of your own? Read this and this.