Babies born to pregnant women with obesity are more likely to develop heart problems and diabetes as adults due to fetal damage caused by the high-fat, high-energy diet of their mother. Image Credit: University of South Australia That’s the groundbreaking finding from a new study published in the Journal of Physiology that shows for the first time that maternal obesity alters a critical thyroid hormone in the fetal heart, disrupting its development. Consuming a high-fat, sugary diet during pregnancy also increases the likelihood of the unborn baby becoming insulin resistant in adulthood, potentially triggering diabetes and causing cardiovascular disease.
This is despite babies being a normal weight at birth. University of South Australia researchers identified the link by analyzing tissue samples from the fetuses of pregnant baboons fed a high-fat, high-energy diet in a biomedical research institute in the United States. They then compared this to fetuses from baboons on a control diet.
Lead author, University of South Australia PhD candidate Melanie Bertossa, says the findings are significant because they demonstrate a clear link between an unhealthy diet high in saturated fats and sugar, and poor cardiovascular health. “There has been a long-standing debate as to whether high-fat diets induce a hyper- or hypothyroid state in the fetal heart. Our evidence points to the latter,” Bertossa says.
“We found that a maternal high-fat, high-energy diet reduced concentrations.