Mothers having a high-fat diet while nursing might compromise their child's health

Jul 13, 2010 10:30 GMT  ·  By

Animal research on this matter was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), July 13-17, 2010 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Scientists from the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, have compared the effects of this type of diet during and after the pregnancy.

Having a baby implies following certain rules. As the mother's and the baby's health are very important, an appropriate diet stands for rule number one. To this adds a healthy way of life, precautions concerning possible harmful factors and a responsible and optimistic attitude. By focusing on the mother's diet, researchers found that it affects the offspring mainly after birth.

Experiments were made on rats, who were fed low fat or high fat diet during pregnancy. Once the babies were born, scientists used the “cross-fostering” method, to see whether prenatal or postnatal diet was more likely to affect the babies. Some newborns were fostered to mothers having kept the same diet as their natural mother and some were adopted by a different diet-consuming rat female.

Conclusions showed that pups fed by mothers following a high-fat diet gained more body weight than others and did so faster. Within a few weeks they became obese, even if their natural mother had consumed a low-fat diet during pregnancy. Baby rats also had a diabetes symptom, an impaired glucose tolerance.

Bo Sun, the study's lead author, says that “these results suggest that high fat diet intake by nursing mothers may be more critical to the later development of obesity and diabetes in their offspring than high fat feeding during pregnancy. Therefore, to help prevent obesity and metabolic problems in their offspring, it may be most important for mothers to avoid consuming too much fat in their diet while nursing.”

It should be said that this experiment was not yet tested on human subjects; still rats are usually a pretty good indicator of what can happen to people, so these observations should be considered by future parents.