A new study suggests that the lasting effects of childhood nutrition are written into our bodies in ways that can influence health decades later.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder examined the teeth of nearly 275 people buried in English cemeteries between 1100 and 1540, including victims of the Black Death, which killed millions across Europe between 1348 and 1350. Teeth preserve chemical signatures, known as isotopes, that reveal whether someone experienced severe nutritional stress in childhood.
The study, published in Science Advances, found that people who endured malnutrition early in life may have been more likely to survive major health threats, such as plague, up to about age 30. But those same individuals appeared to face worse health outcomes in middle and late adulthood.
“What this might indicate is that if people experienced a period of starvation early in their childhoods or adolescence but survived, that could have shaped their development in ways that were beneficial in the short term but led to poor outcomes once they got older,” said lead author Sharon DeWitte, a professor at CU Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Anthropology.
The research builds on a body of evidence suggesting that early-life nutritional stress can cause long-lasting changes in metabolism. These changes may help the body survive in environments where calories are scarce, but they can become a disadvantage when conditions improve. As DeWitte explained, people whose bodies adapted for scarcity may have had “a mismatch with their environments later in life,” which could have led to poor health outcomes.
DeWitte hopes these lessons from the past will guide modern approaches to improving health across the lifespan: “Mortality varied during a catastrophe 700 years ago in ways that might have been preventable. My hope is that we can absorb that lesson and think about how human health can vary across different social categories today, and figure out the points of intervention where we can do something to reduce that burden.”
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the UK Research and Innovation/Arts and Humanities Research Council and The Wenner-Gren Foundation. It also benefited from administrative and computing support from the University of Colorado Population Center, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.