WELLINGTON, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- A recent study to understand and prevent childhood obesity discovered that the nutrients mums receive before and during pregnancy can make a real difference in how much weight their children put on in the first years of life.
The international research involves about 500 mothers and their children in New Zealand, Singapore and Britain, according to the study published on Tuesday in the peer-reviewed medical journal BMC Medicine.
Half the mothers in the study received an enriched supplement including vitamins B2, B6, B12, D, probiotics and myoinositol, together with standard pregnancy supplementation, while the other half were in a control group and received standard pregnancy supplementation alone. Neither the mums nor their medical teams knew which group they were in.
When researchers checked in on the children at age two years, they found half as many obese children in the cohort whose mothers were in the enriched supplement group, compared to the control group, the study said.
In addition, children of the mums in the enriched supplement group were almost 25 percent less likely to have experienced "rapid weight gain," a condition which often leads to obesity.
The data suggests supplementing mums before and during pregnancy can have benefits way beyond the pregnancy and for the women involved, said Prof. Wayne Cutfield of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Auckland's Liggins Institute.
"It can impact their baby into childhood and potentially beyond," Cutfield said, adding the next stage of the research is to try to identify which of the various nutrients in the supplement are producing the beneficial impacts in terms of reducing or preventing unhealthy weight gain.
"We do not yet know the precise mechanism, but there's evidence some of the micronutrients are associated with body metabolism in pregnancy," he said, adding the research team continues to look at the impacts on the children when they are between six and eight years old, Cutfield said.
Prof. Keith Godfrey from the University of Southampton said rates of childhood obesity are continuing to rise in many countries, particularly in less advantaged groups.
The period before and during pregnancy may provide an opportunity to support better nutritional status for the mother as it could have lasting benefits for her child, Godfrey said.
The research was led by the University of Auckland's Liggins Institute and part of the NiPPeR study with the University of Southampton, the National University of Singapore and the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences. ■
