Early Life Nutrition and Older Adult Health: Cross National Patterns of Morbidity Tell a Story

Poor maternal nutrition can have long lasting effects on health across the life course. In this paper a conjecture regarding the long term consequences of the demographic transition of the 1930s-1960s is examined. This transition produced a unique group of individuals that were at risk of having been affected by harsh early poor nutritional environment and, simultaneously, had larger probabilities of surviving due to their exposure to the massive deployment of medical technologies and public health measures. As a result they may be more susceptible to the effects of poor early nutrition at older ages for chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. To test the conjecture survey data were compiled on over 144,000 older adults from 20 low, middle and high income countries from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, the US, England and the Netherlands along with historical country-level caloric intake. Two patterns emerged. Poor early life nutrition was strongly associated with adult obesity particularly in the unique cohorts but there were no direct positive associations between early life nutrition and the odds of reporting heart disease. In contrast, strong positive associations appeared between early life nutrition and the odds of reporting diabetes even after controlling for adult lifestyle and socioeconomic status. Implications: among these unique cohorts, poor early life conditions may have a long lasting impact on adult diabetes that is not mediated nor changed throughout the life course. It may be too premature to say the same for adult heart disease.