Obesity may be caused before birth

Beware of what you eat in pregnancy - you may be predisposing your child to a life of weight problems. This is the suggestion from a study carried out on mice at the Rockerfeller Univeristy which was published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The mice that were fed a high fat diet produced young whose brains contained more brain cells specialised to produce appetite-stimulating proteins. Previous research on adult animals had shown that when triglycerides circulate in the blood they stimulate the production of proteins in the brain known as orexigenic peptides, which in turn stimulate the appetite.

The latest study suggests exposure to triglycerides from the mother's diet has the same effect on the developing foetal brain - and that the effect then lasts throughout the offspring's life.

The researchers compared the offspring of rats fed a high-fat diet for two weeks with those whose mothers ate a moderate amount of fat.
They found that the pups born to the high-fat diet mothers ate more, weighed more throughout life, and began puberty earlier than those born to mothers who ate a normal diet.

They also had higher levels of triglycerides in the blood at birth, and as adults, and a greater production of orexigenic peptides in their brains.

Researchers say that the time to start feeding your child a healthy diet is right at the start of pregnancy.