A new study suggests that the consumption of fried food and pregnancy diabetes could go hand in hand, as researchers found that women who consumed a lot of fried foods before having a baby on the way were two times more likely two develop diabetes during gestation. The fried food and pregnancy diabetes findings were published recently in a medical magazine by a research team from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Rockville, MD, USA.

The fried food and pregnancy diabetes study was published in the magazine Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. The research involved a survey of women's dietary habits using a food frequency questionnaire, according to the website Diabetes.co.uk, starting in 1991 and collecting data from the same women at four-year intervals.

They found that at a later date, when it was time for these women to start families, the highest risk of gestational diabetes was in the women who consumed fried foods 7 times per week or more, and the lowest was among those who ate fried meals only once a week.

In the fried food and pregnancy diabetes paper, entitled "Women who eat fried food regularly before conceiving at increased risk of developing gestational diabetes during pregnancy," the researchers put their point across. In the study, they say: "The potential detrimental effects of fried food consumption on gestational diabetes risk may result from the modification of foods and frying medium and generation of harmful by-products during the frying process. Frying also results in significantly higher levels of dietary advanced glycation end products, the derivatives of glucose-protein or glucose-lipid interactions ... implicated in insulin resistance, pancreatic beta-cell damage and diabetes, partly because they promote oxidative stress and inflammation."

Excessive consumption of fried foods has been linked with diseases like obesity in recent studies.