Which environments matter in studies of early life developmental plasticity?

In 1989, the British epidemiologist David Barker and his colleagues [1] reported intriguing findings from the UK showing that risk for heart disease was highest among people who were born small and thin. This ran counter to conventional wisdom regarding the role of nutrition and weight in cardiovascular diseases, which were classically viewed as ‘diseases of excess’. Research on animal models soon confirmed that restricting nutrient delivery to the fetus induces a similar constellation of adult disease outcomes. This work left little doubt that gestational nutrition and other prenatal factors influence one’s risk for developing many chronic degenerative diseases, which forced a rethink of their fundamental causes.