Originally published June 16 2005
Poor prenatal nutrition leads to obesity later in life, study says
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A recent NewScientist.com article said researchers at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine determined that poor nutrition or malnutrition before birth predisposes children to high-calorie and high-fat intake later in life, which often leads to obesity.
Poor nutrition in the womb may remodel the brain circuitry of newborn babies and predispose them to become obese in later life, research in mice suggests.
The findings may help doctors to prevent the onset of obesity in susceptible infants who are born undernourished, say the researchers.
Previous research has found that babies born to malnourished mothers are more likely to develop heart disease and diabetes in later life.
They reasoned that fetuses who sense food scarcity in the womb set their bodies to store more fat, more efficiently.
To investigate the mechanism behind this, a team led by Shigeo Yura, also at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, gave pregnant mice different feeding regimes -- normal and underfed.
As in previous studies, they found that underfed mothers gave birth to lower-weight pups that grew quickly and caught up with normal pups after 10 days.
When fed a diet with an average calorific content after weaning, pups from both normally fed and underfed mothers weighed the same and had similar fat reserves.
But when the pups that experienced fetal impoverishment were fed a high-fat diet, they grew much bigger than pups that had prenatal plenty.
At 17 weeks, mice from the underfed group weighed about 15% more and stored 50% more fat than the prenatally well-nourished mice on the same high-fat diet.
The underfed pups also showed a premature spike in leptin levels at 8-10 days old, compared with a surge on day 16 in normally fed pups.
To test whether this early spike was the cause of later obesity, the team injected leptin into normally fed mice at 10 days.
These mice also tended to become obese under calorie-rich diets, even though they had experienced no fetal malnutrition.
Understanding this mechanism might help clinicians to reverse fetal programming, says Sagawa.
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