Poor diet during  pregnancy increases offspring's vulnerability to the effects of ageing, new research has shown. The research, by scientists from the University of Cambridge, provides important insight into why children born to mothers who consumed an unhealthy diet during pregnancy have an increased risk of health problems later in life.

"What is most exciting about these findings is that we are now starting to really understand how nutrition during the first nine months of life spent in the womb shape our long term health by influencing how the cells in our body age," said Susan Ozanne, the senior author on the paper and a senior fellow from the Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge.

It is well established that environmentalfactorsinteract with genes throughout life, affecting the expression of those genes and, consequently, tissue function and disease risk, a university release said. Diet during critical periods of development, such as during the nine months in the womb, has been cited as one such environmental factor.

Epigenetics, which refers to modifications to the DNA that regulate how much of a gene is produced, has been suggested to underlie these effects.