Are you what you eat or what your mother ate or both?

Abstract

A high-fat high-sugar (HF-HS) diet promotes cancer development and progression. However, does the timing of diet matter? This is an important question with profound public health relevance. By exposing mice to a HF-HS diet either through feeding to a pregnant mother or nursing mother or after weaning and then chemically inducing breast cancer, the authors found the most crucial time for breast cancer risk was after weaning, while a HF-HS in utero diet actually slowed tumor development. Understanding early-life events provides valuable insight for later life events and proves it is never too early to start preventing disease.