When you have suffered hunger in the womb due to food scarcity, you are more likely to have high blood sugar later in life.
This is not the first time that exposure to hunger . has been linked in the womb and getting chronic conditions like diabetes † But this has not yet been confirmed.
Food Scarcity However, Wageningen and Chinese researchers are now able to do this. The researchers from Wageningen University and their Chinese colleagues assessed almost eight thousand Chinese people who had been exposed to food scarcity in the period 1951-1961. They looked at a region in which this food scarcity was extreme and a region in which this was much less.
They also distinguished in the study between exposure to hunger in the womb and in childhood. What turned out? The people born in the region with extremely little food and exposed to starvation in utero were more than two times more likely to higher blood sugar and type 2 diabetes †
However, this does not apply to the people who in childhood were exposed to great hunger. The Chinese in the region with a slightly less high food scarcity also did not have a significant increase in the blood sugar level †
Knowing more? The research is published in the journal Diabetes .
