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Exposure To Excessive Calories While In The Womb May Spur Overeating In Adulthood, Study Finds Innovation

Exposure To Excessive Calories While In The Womb May Spur Overeating In Adulthood, Study Finds

Your craving unhealthy foods may have begun in your mother’s womb, new research from Rutgers University shows.

The study, published this week in Molecular Metabolism, shows that exposure to excessive calories while in fetal development can alter one’s brain and spur adult overeating.

The researchers made the connection by studying 6 pregnant mice and their subsequent combined litters of nearly 50 mice pups through adulthood. They began by letting 3 mice become obese on unlimited high-fat foods during pregnancy and breastfeeding, while keeping the other 3 pregnant mice slim on a diet of healthy food.

The team found that the mice pups born to the obese mothers overate more than the mice pups born to the lean mothers when given access to unhealthy food.

The findings suggest that children who are born to mothers who were overweight during pregnancy and nursing may struggle later in life to moderate their cravings and avoid unhealthy foods and treats.

“People born to overweight or obese mothers tend to be heavier in adulthood than people born to leaner mothers, and experiments like this suggest that the explanation goes beyond environmental factors such as learning unhealthy eating habits in childhood,” Mark Rossi, professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a senior author of the study, said in a press release.

One element of the research that wasn’t surprising to the researches was that the mice pups who were born to the heavier mothers started off at heavier weights when born as more calories were passed to them through fetal development and while nursing. But their weights soon matched the weights of the mice pups born to the healthier mothers after all the pups received a steady diet of healthy food over the course of several weeks.

Once the mice matured to adulthood, however, the researchers gave both groups unlimited access to high-fat foods and stark differences emerged once again between both groups: All the mice predictably dug in, but the offspring of the overweight mothers overate significantly more than the others. Rossi and his team concluded from the results that the “overnutrition during pregnancy and nursing appears to rewire the brains of developing children and, possibly, future generations.”

From here, the team hopes their research will help inform the creation of drugs that could block excess desires to consume unhealthy foods.

“There’s still more work to do because we don’t yet fully understand how these changes are happening, even in mice,” said Rossi. “But each experiment tells us a little more, and each little bit we learn about the processes that drive overeating may uncover a strategy for potential therapies.”