Can You Make Up For Poor Early Nutrition?
By RaeShelle Erickson
Did you know if you have poor early nutrition your body can help you make up for it? Well it can! Recent studies have shown that our bodies are capable of changing their phenotypic development to help you minimize the effects of poor early nutrition. The downside of this is that it can actually cause negative side effects in later years. One of the most common known side effects is growth. When someone doesn’t get enough nutrition when they’re little we can sometimes they end up being a little shorter than they normally could have been. Later, they could grow a little bit more if they suddenly receive good nutrition.
Another concern of poor early nutrition has been a lower cognitive ability in adults. According to the article, little is known about this in different life stages but we are currently learning. So far from research, scientists have seen that poor early nutrition can affect adults in finding a mate and even finding physiological homeostasis. In animals it’s easier to see it also affecting foraging for food, anti-predatory abilities and even parenting. Evidence has shown that in birds, poor nutrition affects the ability to learn songs and in people it can definitely affect intelligence. In tests, the group that showed the most negative effects was the group with the most compensatory growth happened to be in girls. Following all the effects in people is difficult due to our long life-spans. If we were to start with babies, unfortunately, the people who started the experiment would more than likely be at least retired by the time the babies were full-fledged adults. For this reason, scientists have been looking at song birds. Specifically the zebra finch.
When studying zebra finches, they noticed there are no drastic differences between males and females with or without the nutrition deficiency. In later stages, the finches began to show slower development in nests creating lighter birds than those with perfect nutrition right from the start. Between 20 and 70 days the malnutritioned birds grew more rapidly than the birds with good nutrition. The malnutritioned birds gained 4.75% of their body mass at 20 days. Within the same time period, the healthy birds only grew 2.91%. By day 70 both the healthy and malnutritioned birds were the same weight.
Every bird was able to go through 16 associative learning tests to prove that eventually each bird was able to learn. After the initial 16 tests, the birds were placed into two groups and put through two tests. The results of this showed that the birds who grew quickly after the corrected nutrition did not test as well as those who had the right nutrition and grew at a normal rate. Studies showed that learning ability in adult finches is directly tied to their earlier nutrition. One factor the article said they never took into consideration was the amount of activity of the birds in relation to body mass and learning ability. These kinds of studies are not so easy on people because there are factors in us that can affect our learning and growth that we don’t know of. Our nutrition is a factor but not the entire puzzle. However, poor nutrition was directly linked to learning ability in infants.
In the case of the birds, scientists don’t think activity or outside influences affect the birds learning ability because if it had, they said it would’ve shown in the first 20 days. To help test the infants, they altered the feeding of the babies. One group received 1.45% protein milk and the other group received 1.85% protein and vitamin enriched milk. Studies have shown that the nervous system is prioritized in infants during growth but is not completely protected from poor nutrition. This could be one of the reasons poor early nutrition affects adult learning abilities. In the end, it was revealed that only the speed of learning is affected but everyone will eventually learn the same material.