Experimental study on rats to find the usefulness of nutritional supplementation to undernourished offspring of parents undernourished life-long.

Undernourished parents getting only about half of normal feed requirement and whose body weights were deficient by 40-65% were mated and out of the resulting litters, the medium size (about 8) ones were culled to 8 per dam whose food supply was restricted to 10 g per day during the suckling (category M2). Another category (M3) was constituted out of large (over 12) litters born to similar undernourished parents and culling the litter size to 15 per dam besides restricting the dam's food to only 10 g per day during first week and to 15 g per day during the second and third weeks of suckling. Another category (M1) was constituted like M3 except that the parents were provided with normal, ad libitum nutrition throughout. Effects of post-weaning continuation of undernutrition or of rehabilitation with ad libitum food were studied in M2 groups of pups till 425 days of age. Further, an additional protein-deficient type of undernutrition (M4) was also superimposed in one group of M2 category of pups between day 41 and 60 of age, and then rehabilitated on to normal diet to find the additional effect of this additional load of the protein-malnutrition. The control groups of normal pups were also reared along with the above groups for comparisons. The normal diet had: 22.8% protein, 10.6% fat, 61% carbohydrate, and vitamins and minerals. By 21 days of age, the deficiencies of the M1, M2 and M3 were about 28%, 64% and 77% respectively in body weights, and about 8%, 21% and 30% respectively in brain weights. Continuing the undernutrition after weaning on half of normal feed, the M2 group of males and females stabilized at about 41% and 62% respectively of normal body weights by about 150 days of age. Rehabilitation of M2 or M4 groups by providing ad libitum feed had never recovered their pre-rehabilitation body weight deficits even after the ad libitum feeding for as long as 425 days of age. On the contrary, the brain weights seemed to have partially recovered from the earlier deficits, but here also the general conclusion of permanency of deficits stood unequivocally. The present study affirms that different degrees of gestational, lactational and post-weaning undernutrition can lead to different degrees of growth deficits and that supplemental feeding regimens introduced afterwards cannot bring out recoveries from such previous deficits which seem to remain permanently.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)