Eating Junk Food During Pregnancy May Make Kids Obese
Wow! Like mothers don’t suffer enough guilt.
Now a new study says that if you eat junk food during pregnancy or while you’re breastfeeding, you could cause your child to become obese.
Researchers from the Royal Veterinary College, London, say that pregnant and breastfeeding women shouldn’t eat fatty, salty and sugary foods under the mistaken belief that they’re eating for two.
As published in the British Journal of Nutrition, the study involved rats which ate a diet of processed junk food like muffins, biscuits, doughnuts, crisps and sweets during pregnancy and lactation vs. rats which ate regular feed.
The rats with the junk food diet gave birth to little rats which overate and preferred foods rich in sugar, salt and fat when compared to the offspring of the rats on a regular diet.
The scientists believe these results may apply to humans, too.
They suggest that eating a lot of junk food when you’re pregnant and breastfeeding could cause your children to overeat and develop a taste for junk food.
This could contribute to childhood obesity and make it even harder to teach kids to eat healthier foods.
Technorati Tags: pregnancy, breastfeeding, obesity, overeating, junk food, childhood obesity
August 16th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Does anyone else feel like the “experts” are just piling on with all these obesity studies that prove nothing? Don’t study rats, study people before you start telling us that if we have a doughnut while we’re pregnant we’ve doomed our children to obesity.
August 16th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
We pass on a lot of things to our kids. I guess it makes sense that we pass on our love of junk food if we’re not careful.
August 16th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
They probably don’t mean one doughnut cuz that’s not going to make your baby fat. They probably mean if all you eat is junk food or if you eat a lot of junk food, that could hurt your baby. That’s just common sense.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Before anyone heard of a childhood obesity epidemic, pregnant women routinely ate for two and that included fatty foods. How do the researchers explain all the skinny children they produced?
August 16th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Sometimes, I just craved sweet stuff when I was pregnant. I think it’s getting to be a bit much that we overanalyze everything we eat. When I gained weight, it wasn’t just what I was eating, it was how much I was eating.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Okay. We get it. Quit stuffing our faces with junk food. It’s bad for us. How many studies do they have to do?