London - Exercise daily? Eat your fruit and veg? Stopped smoking? Bad news. You could be doomed, nonetheless.
David Barker's theory sounds pretty hokey when you first hear about it.
The idea is that, irrespective of that gym membership, those five-a-day and that kicked habit, much of our health has been determined by the time we get out of the womb.
You can see why mothers don't believe it when, on Horizon: The Nine Months That Made You, they are asked about Barker's theory, at random in the street. It seems less a scientific prescription, more a kind of fortune-teller's ruse. I'm not sure I want to believe it, either. After all, life would have been a lot more fun if I'd known I had a free pass all along (for this was one enormous baby, back in the day).
Of course, diet and exercise and all those other things do come into it, too. But they are at their most significant where birth weights are particularly low. The lighter you are when you are born, the more you will be affected by your lifestyle.
That is why, or so the theory goes, people like my grandfather live to their late eighties while smoking like chimneys. It's also why Dr Ranjan Yajnik has discovered a new body type, the thin-fat Indian - considerably slimmer than their English counterpart, but carrying significantly more body fat. It explains, he argues, India's epidemic of obesity-related ailments: heart disease, type 2 diabetes and so on.
It is not just our health that may have been pre-determined in this way.
In the US, Dr Janet DiPietro has been testing foetuses for their reactions to disturbance, sounds and movement, then monitoring babies to see if the traits persist. She is adamant that they do. Elsewhere, studies indicate that testosterone levels in the womb are related to the kinds of activities we enjoy later in life. It's convincing - though the real test is still to come.
Back in India, one of Barker's colleagues is leading a drive to boost birth weight, to see if his theory provides dividends. Potential mothers are put on a diet of specially-prepared snacks, to ensure maximum nutrition and boost baby weight. This, of course, is the ironic part. Our own lifestyle might not be quite the self-imposed sentence we tend to assume. Instead, our mother's behaviour is what shapes us - because diet and lifestyle determine birth weight.
However, even more amazingly the lifestyle of your maternal grandmother comes into play, too, since women are born with all their eggs. So the debate is less one of nature versus nurture, but of who was nurtured when. If Barker is right his work represents, as several interviewees noted, a paradigm shift. - - The Independent
