Pregnant moms have to follow so many rules nowadays and the latest is actually about the food intake of moms as scientists pressed that a high-fat diet actually has an effect on the brain of their offspring.
The study shows that the diet also increases the risk of psychiatric conditions to newborn babies. During the meeting of the Society of Neuroscience last November 18, the results were presented.
The study was said to be conducted by Salvatore Fusco and his colleagues from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart located in Rome. They pressed that the said effect could be possible if a pregnant woman consumes forty-five percent of her diet based in fat.
The study was tested on a female mice and it was fed with a high-fat diet four weeks before it mated and again two weeks before the litter of mice was born. The high-fat diet pups reportedly suffered from memory deficits as compared to mice that had mums that fed on normal diets.
Another study was conducted by Staci Bilbo and his colleagues from Duke University and they focused on the same topic. The results showed that the pregnant mice actually gained more weight as it was being fed with a high-fat diet.
The litters of mice then showed higher anxiety as well as depression as compared to the mice moms fed with normal diets.
Aside from the two researches that used mice, another study by Sayuri Kojima and Linda Rinaman from the University of Pittsburgh also tested it on rats and those that were fed with high-fat diet showed that they were more anxious than those fed with normal diets.
Also, there was a decrease in the brain cells that release oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone that is closely associated with food intake, anxiety and maternal abilities of mothers.
Another team from the Oregon National Primate Research Center also used monkeys to test the high-fat diet on mothers. The monkeys have received the high-fat diet for two years and it was found out that there was a relative reduction in the neurons of the baby monkeys.
