Women's Nutrition For Health

 If you are overweight and pregnant, your baby may not be destined to a life of obesity.

 New research has show that modifying fat intake during pregnancy to a moderate level is enough to benefit the child regardless of the mother’s size. Specifically, they found that a protein called “SIRT1″ rewrites a developing foetus’ histone code, which affects his or her “epigenetic likelihood” of being overweight or obese throughout his or her lifetime. A diet laden with fat changes the molecular machinery which chemically modifies the structure of the developing infant’s genetic material.

These commonly called ‘histone code’ changes are rewritten-at least in part-by SIRT1, which in turn, alters key regulators of fat and glucose metabolism in the infant, hopefully breaking the cycle of obesity.

The research was done on three groups of pregnant primates:

Group 1 ate a healthy pregnancy diet (13 percent fat)

Group 2 ate a high fat diet (35 percent fat) and became obese

Group 3 had been kept on a high fat diet for several years, became obese, and then were put on a healthy diet when pregnant.

The results suggest that the livers of infants exposed to the high fat diet, showed less SIRT1 and less sirtuin activity than in the control group. However, infants exposed to a healthy pregnancy diet in both lean and obese groups had restored sirtuin.

To prove that SIRT1 was specifically chemically modifying the histone code, scientists created a dead enzyme version. Using high level mass spectrometry, it was discovered that while the live enzyme version of SIRT1 was very good at chemically modifying histone proteins (specifically “deacetylating” histone protein H3) the dead version was not.

In a nutshell the study showed so even if a woman isn’t eating well before pregnancy, adopting good eating habits during pregnancy is still very good for the child and of course for her.