London : Nutritious food not only boosts babies' growth but could also significantly increase their earning capacity.

A team of researchers has found that babies who are well-fed soon after their birth earn almost 50 per cent more than those who're not -- the findings are based on a three decade survey of Guatemalan males from birth, the 'BBC News' portal reports.

Though food, schooling, the economic environment and the social services provided by government, all play a role, in this study of villagers in Guatemala, nutrition was the only variable that changed.

During the 1970s, some of the babies in the study were given a very nutritious food supplement, some a less nutritious one.

When the researchers returned three decades later to see how the babies, now men, were faring, they found that males who had the very nutritious supplement up to the age of three were earning nearly half as much more per hour than the other villagers.

The girl babies who had become women did not have similar wage differentials, possibly because they had less choice about where they worked.

The results of the study have been published in the British medical journal, 'The Lancet'.

These results were the first direct evidence of a clear link between early life nutrition and adult wages, and that feeding babies well could drive economic growth, according to the journal.