Your mother's diet at the time of your conception has an impact on the rest of your life.
An analsyis of data on births and deaths in Keneba in The Gambia since the 1940s reveals that those adults who were conceived in January (dry season - grains form a major part of the diet) and born in September were seven times more likely to die in any given year than those conceived in September (rainy season - less grains available but more green leafy vegetables) and born in June. But the effects while profound don't appear immediately; up to age 15 children show no noticeable difference.
Dutch Famine study. "At the end of World War Two, the Germans blockaded parts of the Netherlands in retaliation against a rail strike called by the Dutch government. For several months people lived on starvation diets until the Allies liberated Europe; thousands died. The Dutch Famine Birth Cohort Study followed the health of babies of pregnant women caught up in the famine, finding that if you were a young embryo at the time of the famine then you were twice as likely to develop heart disease in later life, and also far more prone to schizophrenia, obesity, diabetes, cancer and stress-related illnesses. The effects persist into the next generation - the children and the grandchildren of a woman caught up in the famine went on to have worse health in later life.
Experiments in animals show it is possible to make the genes in an embryo more active, or turn them off entirely, simply by varying their mother's diet. So eating a diet rich in leafy greens will permanently change how active some of the child's genes are due to a process called methylation; researchers in The Gambia found that babies conceived in the wet season have very different levels of activity of a particular gene that's important for regulating the immune system. Matt Silver, part of the MRC team, says: "Variation in methylation state in this gene could affect your ability to fight viral infections and it may also affect your chances of survival from cancers such as leukaemia and lung cancer."
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BBC News Magazine, 14 September 2015
