The importance of diet in health and disease has been well characterized in the past decades. Although the earlier focus of diet research was in the context of undernutrition and the importance of adequate nutrient intake to prevent malnutrition, in the current era of epidemic obesity the focus of our efforts has evolved toward understanding the effects of excess caloric intake. The current surge in childhood obesity rates suggests a correlation of maternal metabolic syndrome and obesity with programming of the fetal epigenome for metabolic diseases later in life. Alterations of the fetal genome, epigenome and metabolome have been well documented in cases of maternal malnutrition, including both overnutrition and undernutrition. It is of great interest and importance to understand how these divergent maternal factors regulate/program the fetus for metabolic diseases, and we and others have observed that epigenetic modifications to the fetal and placental epigenome accompany these reprogramming events. The following review summarizes recent studies on the effects of maternal diet and obesity on fetal epigenetics contributing to adult diseases later in life by taking advantage of state-of-the-art genomic, epigenomic and metagenomic techniques in nonhuman primate model systems.

在过去的几十年里，饮食对健康和疾病的重要性得到了很好的描述。尽管早期饮食研究的重点是营养不足和充足的营养摄入以防止营养不良的重要性，但在当前流行性肥胖的时代，我们努力的重点已经转向了解热量摄入过多的影响。目前儿童肥胖率的激增表明母体代谢综合征和肥胖与胎儿表观基因组编程在以后的生活中代谢疾病有关。胎儿基因组、表观基因组和代谢组的改变已在母体营养不良的情况下得到充分证明，包括营养过剩和营养不足。了解这些不同的母体因素如何调节/编程胎儿的代谢疾病具有极大的兴趣和重要性，我们和其他人观察到胎儿和胎盘表观基因组的表观遗传修饰伴随着这些重编程事件。以下综述通过利用非人类灵长类动物模型系统中最先进的基因组、表观基因组和宏基因组技术，总结了最近关于母体饮食和肥胖对胎儿表观遗传学影响的研究，这些研究通过利用最先进的基因组、表观基因组和宏基因组技术导致了成年后的成年疾病。