Prenatal Nutritional High Fat Environment and the Evolving Concept of Intergenerational Cardio-Metabolic Disease Risk

According to the World Health Organization’s global database, countries like China, India and Pakistan have a preschool childhood obesity prevalence of about 1% [4]. Childhood obesity increases the risk of obesity in adulthood and parental obesity interacts quite strongly to alter this risk. There are several other interactive factors as well contributing to the increased prevalence of obesity in childhood. Societies like China, India and Pakistan, which are rapidly urbanising, demonstrate increases in energy intake, dramatic increases in fat intake along with increased levels of sedentarianism. Food balance data from the Food and Agriculture Organization show that the change in energy intake in Asian countries has been small, but there have been large changes in consumption of animal products, sugars and fats [5]. The net effect has been a marked shift in the diet with energy from fat (both animal and vegetable) increasing each year [5]. Data from India show that higher-income groups consumed a diet with 32% of the energy from fat while the lower-income groups consumed only 17% energy from fat [6-9].