Anvesha has always been fascinated by nutritional science. She believes it is the key to managing many public health challenges.

Her work highlights the impact good maternal and child nutrition has on the population. As her work continues to grow, she hopes that this evidence will prove the importance of good nutrition for healthy futures.

Anvesha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Epidemiology and a nutritionist in the School of Food and Nutrition.

Read more about Anvesha and her research.

Transcript

[Anvesha is sitting in front of a white background speaking directly to camera.]

Anvesha: What if I tell you that you and I were made by our mothers when they were in their grandmothers' wombs? To add to that baffle, I also tell you that you are not just what you eat, but also what your mum and your grandmother ate.

To explain the story from the start, Professor David Barker from Southampton explained this as all the eggs a woman will ever carry in her ovaries are formed when she's a four-month-old baby. So each one of us spent about five months of our life in our grandmothers' wombs.

So if you'd like to calculate the antique of your egg, then you could take your mum's date of birth and subtract by 20 weeks. Fascinating, isn't it?

This was an introduction to tell you what a woman eats before and during her pregnancy has the power to influence two lifetimes: Her own and the future health of her baby. So we are what our mothers and grandmothers ate.

Coming to my journey as a researcher, a kitchen science kid gifted by my parents sparked my interest in science, and particularly nutrition. And I went on to study nutrition during my undergraduate and post-graduate education. My experiences have contributed to shaping my interests immensely in maternal nutrition and public health nutrition policy today.

During my Masters degree in Glasgow, I was introduced to the idea of developmental programming, which explains that what a woman eats before and during her pregnancy is more important to shape the health of a future child than at any other point in life. In the same year, a report I wrote to the British Health Minister on how to improve the nation's health won me an award.

This interest grew stronger during my clinical role as a nutritionist in a hospital in India. When I worked with obstetricians and observed that women who had diabetes during pregnancy, their placentas and the umbilical cord and the babies looked really different. I also observed that the scissors that obstetricians used while delivering the women and cutting the umbilical cord nearly slipped because there were permanent structural changes to the umbilical cord as a result of the diabetes during pregnancy.

So many studies today, from Southampton in the UK to Mysore in India, have shown that the adult diabetes, that we see has its origin when a baby is poorly nourished in the womb. And more so if a woman has diabetes during pregnancy, which can increase the risk of a baby being born too small or too big. While we know that nutrition before and during pregnancy is important, it is often challenging to tell women to eat well enough to nurture a baby and at the same time control her blood sugar levels.

Diet is very complex and even more complex to measure it as the food that we eat is a combination of different nutrients and is also influenced by many factors such as religion, culture, income and the geographic location a person resides in. Food matters to all of us, and all of us have an opinion. Wide cultural beliefs in India say that women should avoid green leafy vegetables during pregnancy in order to have babies being born with dark skin. On the other hand, the food industries promote iron-rich products which are also high on sugar. Today in Leeds, I continue to study how a woman's diet and her lifestyle influence a baby's birth weight in the Born in Bradford cohort in addition to the markers of genetics and her metabolism.

I hope that the knowledge from my work will contribute to the development of culturally appropriate nutrition food-based guidelines for women in the UK, India and across the globe. The confluence of research and education is important to convey to the policymakers and the public to make future generations healthy.