Your child’s health starts in your teens

Early intervention: Turning over a healthy new leaf during pregnancy or after your child is born is often too little, too late for your child’s health and development. — AFP

MELBOURNE: New research has revealed how starting healthy habits early in life can help ensure not only our own well-being, but also that of our children.

Carried out by an international team of researchers at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in the United States, the new study analysed data from more than 140 recent research papers and 200 countries to look at how lifestyle habits, rather than genes, affect how health is transmitted from one generation to the next.