Maternal Perinatal Nutrition and Offspring Programming

Abstract Maternal nutrition during pregnancy, and other perinatal periods, programs offspring physiology and metabolism, as well as the risk of suffering metabolic diseases during adulthood. During pregnancy, there is a double interaction of nutritional intake and genetic background due to the maternal feeding and genes, and fetal genetic information and in utero nutrient availability. The main molecular mechanism implicated in developmental programming appears to be epigenetics, which regulate gene expression patterns during embryo and postnatal stages in a cellular- and tissue-specific manner, affecting metabolic and physiologic-related key genes. Epigenetic profiles are nutritionally modulated, and also the expression patterns of genes related to nutrient metabolism can be epigenetic driven. Therefore, there appears a novel scientific perspective involving nutriepigenetic and nutriepigenomic regulation, which has to be integrated into the traditional nutrigenetic and nutrigenomic lines of sight. Interestingly, maternal programming may predispose the transcriptomic patterns during different lifetime periods and appear to be also transmissible across successive generations. Although human studies of developmental programming are recent and mainly observational, there is evidence of epigenetically driven programming due to different macro- and micronutrient distribution as well as by total caloric intake. However, although omics-based human approaches have importantly increased the knowledge for future nutrition-based epigenetic regulation, ethical and practical considerations lead to animal approaches as the most useful mechanistic research tool. There is still needed a deeper understanding of the nutritionally driven epigenetic reactions in utero that may lead to apply an effective personalized maternal nutrition during pregnancy.