Early Life Diet, Environmental Factors and Biomarkers for Childhood Growth and Development
A special issue of Nutrients (ISSN 2072-6643). This special issue belongs to the section "Pediatric Nutrition".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 September 2026 | Viewed by 319
Editors
Interests: child growth and development; obesity; epidemiology; environmental factors associated with maternal and child health
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: early life exposures; NDDs; HDP; acetaminophen; ASD
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Early life represents a critical window of developmental plasticity, during which nutritional exposures and environmental influences can significantly shape growth patterns, neurodevelopment, and metabolic programming. While extensive research has documented the independent effects of diet and environmental toxicants on pediatric health, significant gaps remain in understanding their complex interactions—particularly how nutritional status may modify susceptibility to environmental hazards, or how concurrent exposures may alter nutrient metabolism and requirements.
This Special Issue aims to elucidate the interplay between early dietary patterns and environmental exposures in shaping childhood health outcomes. We specifically emphasize that submissions must incorporate a nutritional dimension; manuscripts that focus solely on environmental factors without dietary assessment or mechanistic consideration of nutrition–environment interactions are outside the scope of this Issue and will not be considered for publication. We welcome original research articles, systematic reviews, and prospective cohort studies that assess the effects of nutritional status and environmental exposures during pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood. Priority will be given to interdisciplinary approaches that investigate physiological indicators of growth (growth trajectories, overweight, obesity), metabolic health, and neurodevelopment (autism, ADHD, etc.), with an emphasis on identifying vulnerable subpopulations and informing targeted interventions to optimize early life developmental potential.
Specific areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
-Independent dietary effects: Articles examining the sole impact of early-life nutrition (e.g., breastfeeding, complementary feeding, micronutrient status, dietary patterns) on child health outcomes.
-Diet–environment interactions: Studies investigating how nutritional status modifies environmental toxicant susceptibility, or how environmental exposures alter nutrient metabolism and requirements.
-Multi-omics integration: Research utilizing genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, or microbiomics (or a combination thereof) to unravel mechanistic pathways linking diet, environment, and health outcomes.
-Environmental context: Investigations on how environmental factors (e.g., pollutants, chemicals, built environment) interact with diet to influence developmental programming.
Prof. Dr. Haijun Wang
Dr. Yuelong Ji
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Nutrients is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- early life nutrition
- environmental exposures
- diet-environment interactions
- developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD)
- childhood growth biomarkers
- prenatal and postnatal diet
- nutritional epidemiology
- environmental toxicology
- metabolic programming
- pediatric growth trajectories
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