By Dr. Jane Sadler
Dallas Morning News
The convenience store checkout counters have been weighed down with magazines depicting plump pregnant pop celebrities. With unflattering pictures as evidence, these women are accused of developing unhealthy food addictions and put on trial in the court of public opinion.
How much is too much weight gain during pregnancy? Can excess weight gain be unhealthy for mom and baby?
In the 1930s, women were advised to gain only 15 pounds during pregnancy. These strict standards may have led to infants with low birth weight and neurological disorders.
By 1987, the Committee on Nutritional Status During Pregnancy and Lactation of the Institute of Medicine updated guidelines. Those guidelines say that women at normal weight should gain about 25 to 35 pounds during the course of a pregnancy. An overweight woman should gain between 15 and 25 pounds, and an obese woman should add only 11 to 20 pounds during her nine months of pregnancy. Morbidly obese women may need far less weight gain and need physician-guided strategies to promote healthier eating.
According to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the amount of weight gain during pregnancy can affect not just the immediate health of the woman and her baby but the future health of both as well. This is more important as more women today are overweight or obese prior to becoming pregnant.
Now provocative research suggests weight-loss surgery may help break that unhealthy cycle in an unexpected way — by affecting how their children’s genes behave. In a first-of-a-kind study, Canadian researchers tested children born to obese women, plus their brothers and sisters who were conceived after the mother had obesity surgery. Youngsters born after mom lost lots of weight were slimmer than their siblings. They also had fewer risk factors for diabetes or heart disease.
More intriguing, the researchers discovered that numerous genes linked to obesity-related health problems worked differently in the younger siblings than in their older brothers and sisters.
Clearly diet and exercise play a huge role in how fit the younger siblings will continue to be, and it’s a small study. But the findings suggest the children born after mom’s surgery might have an advantage.
“The impact on the genes, you will see the impact for the rest of your life,” said Dr. Marie-Claude Vohl of Laval University in Quebec City. She helped lead the work reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Associated Press contributed to this article
