【正文】 ormation that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. faced with severely limited resources, a smallersized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.
　　the real trouble es when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. this is what happened to the children of the dutch amp。re preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. the fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. and the basis of the fetusamp。s going on. it seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. theyamp。 prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. they have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance a precursor of diabetes.
　　why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? one explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. when food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. this keeps the fetus alive in the shortterm, but the bill es due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, bee more susceptible to disease.
　　but that may not be all thatamp。 researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. these individualsamp。hunger winter,amp。t be discovered for many years. decades after the amp。 as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. but there was another population that was affected the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. but others wouldnamp。hunger winter,amp。s carefully rationed food reserve was pletely exhausted. the specter of mass starvation loomed. and then on may 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when holland was liberated by the allies.
　　the amp。s siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades so cold the water in the canals froze solid. soon food became scarce, with many dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day a quarter of what they consumed before the war. as weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. by the beginning of may, the nationamp。re born. in the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of world war ii, germ