What happens in the womb and during the first 1,000 days of life is critical to shaping a baby’s future health, a fact that is becoming ever more apparent as research dives deeper into this period.

A glaring example is gestational diabetes, a temporary form of diabetes that some women develop during pregnancy.

Though gestational diabetes usually disappears after delivery, its presence during pregnancy doubles — and in some cases triples — the risk of future Type 2 diabetes for both the mother and her child.

This problem deserves our attention, as do other factors in early childhood that also contribute to future risk of diabetes. These include low-quality diet, ultraprocessed foods and sedentary lifestyle due to heavy screen time, as well as pressures at work-life integration, which is challenging urbanized societies worldwide.

Sometimes the way to root out threats to the health of mothers and children is through large-scale research sampling the entire population. Sometimes we need to take a deeper look at specific communities to find issues that affect them more than others.

We know that in Canada, gestational diabetes occurs more commonly in racialized populations. South Asian, Middle Eastern, North African and East Asian women experience the........

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