Danger of pregnancy diets

Women who diet during pregnancy are cutting years off the lives of their unborn children, scientists warned yesterday. Fad diets and poor eating habits among mothers-to-be deprive the foetus of essential nutrients - making the child more vulnerable to obesity and premature death. And bottle-feeding in the first months of life can make the child's outlook even worse, said researchers. Experiments on mice suggest the human lifespan could be cut by up to a third - the equivalent of dying at 50 rather than 75. Scientists at the University of Cambridge studied how diet, before and after birth, affected life expectancy. They found a poor diet in pregnancy leads to poor foetal growth and "programmes" the baby's metabolism for life. Its metabolism is geared to surviving on reduced amounts of food. So when food becomes plentiful after birth, the child is prone to obesity - raising the risk of heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses. Mice experiments The most long-lived m...