(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Mothers who eat a high-fat diet during pregnancy
may increase the likelihood of their child being overweight.
Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York discovered that rats that were
given a high-fat diet during pregnancy showed permanent changes in their
offspring’s brain that lead to overeating and obesity. This finding could
provide a key step towards understanding the mechanisms of fetal programming and
could explain the increased prevalence of child obesity over the last 30 years.
“This work provides the first evidence for a fetal program that links high
levels of fats circulating in the mother’s blood during pregnancy to the
overeating and increased weight gain of offspring after weaning,” senior author
Sarah F. Leibowitz, who directs the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurobiology at
Rockefeller, was quoted as saying.
The study revealed rat pups born to mothers who consumed the high fat diet, even
after the diet had been removed at birth, ate more, weighed more throughout
life, and began puberty earlier than those born to mothers who ate a balanced
diet for the same two week period.
Researchers also looked at the rat pups’ brain development during the last week
of pregnancy. They found the pups from mothers fed high-fat diets had a much
larger number of neurons that produce appetite-stimulating nueropeptides -- and
kept them throughout their lives.
“We’re programming our children to be fat,” Leibowitz was quoted as saying. “I
think it’s very clear that there’s vulnerability in the developing brain, and
we’ve identified the site of this action where new neurons are being born. We
now need to understand how the lipids affect these precursor cells that form
these fat-sensitive neurons that live with us throughout life.”
SOURCE: Journal of Neuroscience, 2008;28:12107-12119
