(Press-News.org) Eating a low quality diet, high in foods and food components associated with chronic inflammation, during pregnancy may be associated with an increased risk of obesity and excess body fat in children, especially during late-childhood. The findings are published the open access journal BMC Medicine.
Researchers from University College Dublin, Ireland found that children of mothers who ate a higher quality diet, low in inflammation-associated foods, during pregnancy had a lower risk of obesity and lower body fat levels in late-childhood than children whose mothers ate a lower quality diet, high in inflammation-associated foods, while pregnant. This association was not observed in early or mid-childhood.
Ling-Wei Chen, the corresponding author said: "Obesity in childhood often carries on into adulthood and is associated with a higher risk of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes. Mounting evidence suggests that maternal diet influences pregnancy and birth outcomes and points to the first one thousand days of a child's life, from conception to two years old, as a critical period for preventing childhood obesity. Our research indicates that children born to mothers who eat a low-quality diet, high in inflammation-associated foods, during pregnancy may be more likely to have obesity or excess body fat in late childhood than those born to mothers who eat a high-quality diet low in inflammation-associated foods."
To examine the effects of maternal diet on the likelihood of childhood obesity and excess body fat, the authors analysed data collected from 16,295 mother-child pairs in seven European birth cohort studies, from Ireland, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Poland, which are involved in the ALPHABET consortium. On average, mothers were 30 years old and had a healthy BMI. Mothers reported the food they ate before and during pregnancy. The researchers assessed dietary quality and whether diets were high in foods and food components associated with chronic inflammation, such as saturated fat, refined carbohydrates and red and processed meat. Children's BMI was calculated in early, mid and late childhood. Additional data on children's body composition during mid or late childhood was collected in five of the cohorts included in the study.
The researchers found that children born to mothers who ate diets high in foods associated with inflammation throughout pregnancy tended to have lower levels of fat-free body mass, indicating lower levels of muscle mass, in late-childhood than those whose mothers ate diets low in inflammation-associated foods. Previous research has found that low levels of muscle mass may be associated with a higher risk of combined diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity
An association between a lower quality maternal diet, high in inflammation-associated foods, and lower levels of fat-free body mass in late-childhood was found to be stronger in boys than in girls. An association between lower quality maternal diet, high in inflammation-associated foods, and higher body fat levels in mid-childhood was stronger in girls than in boys.
Catherine Phillips, the principal investigator and coordinator of the ALPHABET project said: "Previous research has suggested that lower maternal carbohydrate intake in early pregnancy can induce epigenetic changes - that is changes which alter gene expression - in children that may be associated with an increased risk of obesity. We propose that a lower quality maternal diet, high in inflammation-associated foods, may similarly induce epigenetic changes and that this may increase the risk of children having obesity or excess body fat in later childhood. Our findings suggest that promoting an overall healthy diet, high in fruit and vegetables and low in refined carbohydrates and red and processed meats, throughout pregnancy may help prevent childhood obesity."
The authors caution that the observational nature of the study does not allow for conclusions about a causal relationship between maternal diet and childhood obesity and excess body fat. Future research should account in more detail for other factors that could influence the risk of obesity in childhood, such as childhood physical activity and diet, according to the authors.
INFORMATION:
Media Contact
Deborah Kendall-Cheeseman
Assistant Press Officer
Springer Nature
T: +44 (0)20 7843 2653
E: deborah.kendall@springernature.com
Notes to editor:
1. Research article:
"Maternal dietary quality, inflammatory potential and childhood adiposity: an individual participant data pooled analysis of seven European cohorts in the ALPHABET consortium"
BMC Medicine 2021
DOI: 10.1186/s12916-021-01908-7
After the embargo lifts, the article will be available here:
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-021-01908-7
Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BMC's open access policy.
2. BMC Medicine is the flagship medical journal of the BMC series. An open access, transparent peer-reviewed general medical journal, BMC Medicine publishes outstanding and influential research in all areas of clinical practice, translational medicine, medical and health advances, public health, global health, policy, and general topics of interest to the biomedical and sociomedical professional communities. We also publish stimulating debates and reviews as well as unique forum articles and concise tutorials.
3. A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC series. At BMC, research is always in progress. We are committed to continual innovation to better support the needs of our communities, ensuring the integrity of the research we publish, and championing the benefits of open research. BMC is part of Springer Nature, giving us greater opportunities to help authors connect and advance discoveries across the world.
Researchers have mapped an underlying "psychological signature" for people who are predisposed to holding extreme social, political or religious attitudes, and support violence in the name of ideology.
A new study suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and unconscious cognition - the ways our brains take in basic information - is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism and religious fervour.
These mental characteristics include poorer working memory and slower "perceptual strategies" - the unconscious processing of changing stimuli, such as shape and colour - as well as tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.
This combination of cognitive and ...
Researchers have called on European policymakers to make adequate resources available to tackle pancreatic cancer, a disease that is almost invariably fatal and where little progress has been made over the past 40 years.
In the latest predictions for cancer deaths in the EU and UK for 2021, published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Monday), researchers led by Carlo La Vecchia (MD), a professor at the University of Milan (Italy), say that pancreatic death rates are predicted to remain approximately stable for men, but continue to rise in women in most EU countries.
The researchers predict that ...
Home gardens are by far the biggest source of food for pollinating insects, including bees and wasps, in cities and towns, according to new research.
The study, led by the University of Bristol and published today in the Journal of Ecology, measured for the first time how much nectar is produced in urban areas and discovered residential gardens accounted for the vast majority - some 85 per cent on average.
Results showed three gardens generated daily on average around a teaspoon of Nature's ambrosia, the unique sugar-rich liquid found in flowers which pollinators drink for energy. While a teaspoon ...
Muscle is the largest organ that accounts for 40% of body mass and plays an essential role in maintaining our lives. Muscle tissue is notable for its unique ability for spontaneous regeneration. However, in serious injuries such as those sustained in car accidents or tumor resection which results in a volumetric muscle loss (VML), the muscle's ability to recover is greatly diminished. Currently, VML treatments comprise surgical interventions with autologous muscle flaps or grafts accompanied by physical therapy. However, surgical procedures often lead to a reduced muscular function, and in some cases result in a complete graft failure. Thus, there is a demand for additional therapeutic options to improve muscle loss recovery.
A promising strategy to improve ...
Coral within the family Acropora are fast growers and thus important for reef growth, island formation, and coastal protection but, due to global environmental pressures, are in decline
A species within this family has three different color morphs - brown, yellow-green, and purple, which appear to respond differently to high temperatures
Researchers looked at the different proteins expressed by the different color morphs, to see whether these were related to their resilience to a changing environment
The green variant was found to maintain high levels of green fluorescent proteins during summer heatwaves and was less likely to bleach than the other two morphs
This suggest that resistance to thermal stress is influenced by a coral's underlying genetics, ...
Periodic pulses of light forming a comb in the frequency domain are
widely used for sensing and ranging. The key to the miniaturisation of
this technology towards chip-integrated solutions is the generation of
dissipative solitons in ring-shaped microresonators. Dissipative solitons
are stable pulses circulating around the circumference of a nonlinear
resonator.
Since their first demonstration, the process of dissipative soliton
formation has been extensively studied and today it is rather
considered as textbook knowledge. Several directions of further
development are ...
A survey by a Boston University researcher of nearly 33,000 college students across the country reveals the prevalence of depression and anxiety in young people continues to increase, now reaching its highest levels, a sign of the mounting stress factors due to the coronavirus pandemic, political unrest, and systemic racism and inequality.
"Half of students in fall 2020 screened positive for depression and/or anxiety," says END ...
Microorganisms possess natural product biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) that may harbor unique bioactivities for use in drug development and agricultural applications. However, many uncharacterized microbial BGCs remain inaccessible. Researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign previously demonstrated a technique using transcription factor decoys to activate large, silent BGCs in bacteria to aid in natural product discovery.
Now, they have developed a direct cloning method that aims to accelerate large-scale discovery of novel natural products. Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications.
Named Cas12a assisted precise targeted cloning using in vivo Cre-lox recombination (CAPTURE), ...
DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke researchers have been studying something that happens too slowly for our eyes to see. A team in biologist Philip Benfey's lab wanted to see how plant roots burrow into the soil. So they set up a camera on rice seeds sprouting in clear gel, taking a new picture every 15 minutes for several days after germination.
When they played their footage back at 15 frames per second, compressing 100 hours of growth into less than a minute, they saw that rice roots use a trick to gain their first foothold in the soil: their growing tips make ...
A chemist from RUDN University, working with a group of colleagues, synthesized three new chalcogenides (compounds that contain metals and elements from group 16 of the periodic table). The team suggested an unusual approach to synthesis that was based on iodine. An article about the work was published in the Dalton Transactions journal.
Chalcogens are elements of group 16 of the periodic table that include oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, polonium, and livermorium--an artificial radioactive element. Chalcogenides are compounds of chalcogens with metals that are used as photosensitive ...
