Paper short abstract:

What does it means to say that you are what your grandmother ate? This paper examines how the fetal origins hypothesis has come to represent a particular ‘biohabitus’ that positions women as central to scientific and popular understandings of obesity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically examines the most significant paradigm shift in reproductive medicine, the fetal origins theory of adult disease, or Barker's hypothesis. Fetal origins scientists argue that chronic adult diseases have their origins in the intra-uterine environment, so a pregnant woman's diet may result in underweight babies, thus 'programming' fetuses into metabolic pathways of chronic adult diseases (such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes). In line with increased clinical research and public attention to obesity, this 'new science' has been mobilised to explain a common sense and casual relationship between fat mothers, fat babies and the transmission of obesity through generations. Maternal obesity is said to increase the transfer of nutrients across the placenta, thus inducing permanent changes in appetite and metabolism that can 'accelerate' obesity through future generations. These scientific 'facts' about pregnant bodies and the ingestion of certain foods, intersect with historical discourses concerning women's appetites and reproductive bodies. In this maternal lineage of fat transmission obese women's bodies are presented as harming fetuses, and it is the uncontrollable appetites of mothers-to-be that are blamed for the obesity 'epidemic'.