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Welcome to Early Nutrition,
Development, and Health.
My name is Chris Kuzawa.
I'm a Biological Anthropologist
at Northwestern University.
In this talk, I'm going to
discuss some exciting new
research that's providing
insights into the causes
of some of the most common
sources of adult mortality,
including obesity, diabetes,
and cardiovascular disease,
and we've known for a long time
that these conditions have
both a hereditary component
tracing to the genes,
and a lifestyle component
tracing to factors like diet.
But during the past
15 years or so,
we've learned that
there's a third component
of risk for these conditions,
which traces to the plasticity
of developmental biology.
Biological systems
like energy metabolism
have the capacity to
modify their settings
in response to conditions
experienced early in life.
As we'll discuss,
this plasticity may have an
important adaptive function,
but also has an effect on
metabolism and physiology
that lingers into adulthood
to influence our risk of
developing metabolic and
cardiovascular disease.
Our goals in this lecture
will be to first review
the evidence for these effects
of development on later health,
but more importantly,
to use an evolutionary
framework to try
to illuminate why
the body responds
to early environments
in this way.
In the course of
addressing this problem,
we will cover a
broad terrain that
touches on everything from
the basic principles of
evolutionary biology,
fractals and nature, the
evolution of the human brain,
the function of baby fat,
and the causes and consequences
of infant mortality.
But before reviewing
this literature
and the evolutionary
forces that shape
this aspect of our
developmental biology,
let's first begin with a finding
that is likely quite familiar.
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This graph shows
the relationship
between excess body weight,
as measured by the
body mass index,
and risk of suffering from a heart
attack or coronary heart disease.
If there's anything that we know
about cardiovascular diseases,
it's that gaining excess
weight is a sure way
to increase our risk
of suffering from one.
Now because this relationship
is so well known,
