Developmental programming of adult stress responses: early life nutrition permanently alters stress and immune function.

Obese children are more likely to grow up to be obese adults and their diet in early life may be at least partly to blame. As well as contributing to obesity, the early life diet has lasting effects on other aspects of physiology. My preliminary findings show that overfeeding in early life exacerbates adult responses to psychological stress and immune challenge. Underfeeding can have opposite effects. Understanding how early life feeding programs adult physiology will be crucial in understanding and treating hyperactive stress and immune function in obese individuals. I thus aim to determine how early life nutrition affects stress and immune physiology long-term, and whether these effects are specific to the developmental period.