>Arly, could you elaborate and enlarge a little more on the >"grandmother effect" you mentioned on May 31?... Judy Knopf Hi Judy, The grandmother effect was covered in one of my graduate nutrition courses. Reading the research on the grandmother effect made a big impact on me. Since I've just moved (my notes are still packed), and my nutrition professor has died, I'm going to have to just paraphrase from memory (or do a literature search, which I may do). Anyway, it goes like this: nutritionists have noticed that malnutrition during a woman's pregnancy seems to affect the daughter's ability to nourish her fetus, resulting in smaller grandchildren, or other changes. Obviously it would be immoral to experiment on humans, and longitudinal studies based on self-selected diets of specific individuals are difficult in that the period of elapsed time is so long, so nutrition researchers designed animal studies to see if they could measure a physiological effect. Sure enough, in animal studies the placenta in the daughter is measurably affected in its ability to deliver a variety of nutrients, when she herself was deprived in utero. This is exciting in that it gives weight to the observations of human nutritionists in the field, and rise to the term, "grandmother effect." Arly [log in to unmask] (Arly Helm, LC)