Robert Lustig explains the Barker hypothesis: low birth weight predicts higher risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and obesity later in life. The critical window extends into the first thousand days after birth, when altered hormones reprogram genes and create tissues that look normal but function abnormally.
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This problem that Barker found is relevant to coronary disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, all consistent with this thing called metabolic syndrome. Okay? And here's just some of the data that Barker found, okay? That the birth weight was the most important thing for risk for disease later. This, of course, is now, you know, in the Zeitgeist. This was a Time magazine article about epigenetics, okay? This whole concept of the first nine months. And now we've got this thing called the first thousand days, because we realize that it actually extends to two years after birth, that this critical window when things happen, it alters the epigenetic programming of cells and tissue via alterations in growth factor and hormone concentrations, which I'll show you in a moment. It results in changes in gene expression and protein regulation, which we call functional alterations. These lead to tissues that look normal but are metabolically not.