Bad diet in pregnancy raises diabetes risk for child

21 Jan, Daily Telegraph

Having a bad diet during pregnancy raises the unborn child’s risk of developing diabetes in later life by reducing their ability to store fat, a study suggests.

Poor nutrition while in the womb makes the body less equipped to hold fats in the correct parts of the body, meaning they are more likely to build up in places where they can cause harm such as the liver and muscle.

This raises the risk of diabetes and other age-related diseases in later stages of life, researchers from Cambridge and Leicester Universities said. The findings could help experts determine which people are at the highest risk of developing these conditions and design new treatments. Prof Anne Willis, one of the researchers, said: “One of the ways that our bodies cope with a rich modern western diet is by storing excess calories in fat cells. “When these cells aren’t able to absorb the excess then fats get deposited in other places, like the liver, where they are much more dangerous and can lead to type 2 diabetes.”

The study, published in the Cell Death and Differentiation journal, found that people who had been exposed to a bad diet while in the womb had higher levels of a molecule in their body called mir-483-3p. Rats who were fed a low-protein diet during pregnancy gave birth to offspring which also had high levels of the molecule, and they went on to develop smaller fat cells and were less able to store fat once fully grown. When fed a high-calorie diet the offspring were less likely to gain excessive weight, but were more likely to develop diabetes.

Dr Susan Ozanne, who led the study, said: “It has been known for a while that your mother’s diet during pregnancy plays an important role in your adult health, but the mechanisms in the body that underlie this aren’t well understood. “We have shown in detail how one mechanism links poor maternal diet to diabetes and other diseases that develop as we age.”