On its website, BBC News (11/17) reports, “Eating a high-fat diet in pregnancy may cause changes in the fetal brain that lead to over-eating and obesity early in life,” according to a study published in the Nov. 12 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. For the study, “researchers compared the offspring of rats fed a high-fat diet for two weeks with those whose mothers ate a moderate amount of fat.” Their analysis indicated that, “even before the birth, the high-fat pups had a much larger number of brain cells that produce orexigenic peptides – and they kept them throughout their lives.” The high-fat diet “appeared to stimulate production of the cells, and their subsequent migration to parts of the brain linked to obesity.”
The researchers discovered that rat pups “born to mothers that ate the high-fat diet ate more, weighed more throughout life, and began puberty earlier than pups born to mothers that ate a balanced diet,” HealthDay (11/14, Preidt) added. Notably, “the pups born to the mothers that at the high-fat diet also had higher levels of triglycerides in the blood at birth and as adults.”