Junk Food During Pregnancy, Bigger Impact On Childhood Obesity

Eating junk food during pregnancy could have a bigger impact on childhood obesity, liver disease and diabetes than whether a mother is overweight, according to a study conducted on monkeys. A high-fat diet of potato chips, peanut butter and chocolate in pregnant monkeys produced fetuses with fatty-liver disease, a potential precursor to diabetes. And their babies were obese by six months old, according to research from the University Of Colorado School Of Medicine. It didn't matter whether the adult monkeys who ate the high-fat diet actually got fat. The study is evidence that the childhood obesity epidemic might start in the womb, said Jed Friedman, University of Colorado pediatrics, biochemistry and molecular genetics professor and co-author of the study. "Maybe there is something in pregnancy that sets you up," he said. Almost one-third of children aged six to 19 and 12 per cent of infants in the United States are overweight, according to a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and obesity is now the most prevalent nutritional disease of children and adolescents in the US. "That is not due to genetics - it has to be due to environment," Professor Friedman said. Scientists from the University of Colorado and the Oregon National Primate Research Centre studied about 100 macaque monkeys for five years and watched half of the monkeys eat a healthy diet of fruits, vegetables and 15 per cent fat.

The other half got a diet similar to an American human - high-calorie and 35 per cent fat. Researchers removed the fetuses from some of the pregnant monkeys in the third trimester to study their organs, finding fatty-liver disease in the fetuses from mothers on fatty diets. Other monkeys were allowed to give birth, and the babies born to those mothers on the high-fat diets became obese. Monkeys on the junk food diet lived together and could eat as much or as little as they wanted. Some of them stayed thin, while others grew fat - but their babies all got fat, leading researchers to believe their diet in the womb made the offspring more likely to become obese. "It implicates the saturated fat in the diet as the culprit," Professor Friedman said. A high-fat diet in the womb may also affect the "appetite centre" of the brain, meaning baby monkeys might have problems with appetite control after birth, he says. In the next phase of the study, researchers will study what happens when the baby monkeys which have been eating junk food are switched to a healthy diet.