AUDIO: Can mom's diet lower baby's risk of disease?

Two University of British Columbia researchers are looking into how a mother's diet during pregnancy affects the health of her baby.

"Maternal diets really have a profound effect on their offspring's health even if that offspring eats a different diet," biologist Deanna Gibson told CBC's As It Happens. "And that's just a fundamental idea that I don't think most of us actually understand."

Gibson andSanjoy Ghosh, both assistant professors in biology at UBC's Okanagan campus, have received a $100,000 grant from the Grand Challenges Explorations program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to look at how people's susceptibility to disease is affected by the types of fats their mothers ate during pregnancy.

For example, Gibson said, studies have already shown that if a mother eats large amounts of fish oil during pregnancy, it may exacerbate her child's colitisan inflammation of the colon.

The effects of a mother's diet on her unborn children seem to be linked to the microflorathe microorganisms that live in people's gutsthat are passed on from mother to child, Gibson said. There is evidencemicroflora canaffect not only susceptibility to infection but alsomay have links tometabolic disease, diabetes and even autism, she added.

"It's in thatfirst two years of a baby's life that they collect all their microflora," Gibson said. "Some of us believe that this might be stable then for their entire adult life."

Gibson and Ghosh hope that experiments in mice will show whether altering a mother's diet during pregnancycan affect microflora in a way that reduces her offspring's susceptibility to infection.