Mention pregnancy and food in the same sentence, and the common phrase of “eating for two” will probably come to mind. But an innovative new study indicates that this may be a worrying oversimplification.
Scientists have now warned that pregnant mothers who are clinically obese or who consume too much fat or sugar could be putting their babies at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life. The stark findings come as a staggering estimate of 63.8% of adults aged 18 and over are overweight or obese in England, according to Government data.
“You are born with all the heart cells you will ever have,” he said PhD candidate Melanie Bertossa, who led the study from the University of South Australia. “The heart does not produce enough new cardiac muscle cells after birth to repair any damage, so changes that negatively impact these cells before birth can persist throughout life.
“These permanent changes can cause an even greater decline in heart health as children reach adolescence and adulthood, when the heart begins to age.”
As part of the study, a group of female baboons were randomly assigned to either a control diet or a ‘high-fat, high-energy diet’ nine months before conceiving a baby. After they conceived, scientists waited 184 days for the fetuses to develop.
They were delivered by Caesarean section under anaesthetic and killed “humanely” before their heart tissue was harvested. Shockingly, the results showed that the high-fat, high-energy diet altered the foetus’ thyroid hormones, and experts have noted that this could “increase the risk of cardiometabolic disorders in later life in offspring born from these pregnancies”.
These include high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and heart failure, the latter of which refers to a type of heart disease. British Heart Foundation states that coronary heart disease is the cause of about one in six deaths worldwide.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, has also been the leading global cause of death for the past 30 years. Betrossa continued: “There is a long-standing debate about whether high-fat diets induce a hyper- or hypothyroid state in the fetal heart. Our evidence points to the latter.
“We found that a maternal diet high in fat and energy reduced concentrations of the active thyroid hormone T3, which acts as a switch in late gestation, telling the fetal heart to start preparing for life after birth. Without this signal, the fetal heart develops differently.”
Importantly, the worrying problems were identified in babies who had a normal birth weight, leading the researchers to recommend that all babies should have heart health screening. Senior author Professor of Physiology Janna Morrison explained: “Cardiometabolic health screening should be performed on all babies born in these types of pregnancies, not just those born very small or very large, with the aim of detecting heart disease risks earlier.”