The predictive adaptive response and metabolic syndrome: challenges for the hypothesis

In humans and other mammals, maternal undernutrition or stress during gestation results in small offspring with permanently altered metabolism and tissue composition. It has been suggested that such responses might exist because in utero conditions provide a reliable ‘prediction’ of the environmental conditions that foetuses will eventually be exposed to during adulthood. Thus, some developmental responses to the early environment might improve an individual's evolutionary success in a similar future environment.