Ling-Wei Chen and colleagues from University College Dublin defined the link between maternal dietary quality and childhood overweight and obesity. 

Their study looked at data from more than 16,000 mother-child pairs in seven European cohorts, looking at maternal pre-, early-, late-, and whole-pregnancy diet quality and inflammatory potential.  

Chen and colleagues used the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension score and the energy-adjusted Dietary Inflammatory Index Score to evaluate the data.  

The primary endpoint was childhood overweight, and obesity, which the researchers defined as age- and sex-specific body mass index greater than the 85th percentile. Secondary outcomes included the sum of skinfold thickness, fat mass index, and fat-free mass index.  

According to results published in BMC Medicine, patients had a mean age of 30.2 at delivery and a mean BMI of 23.4. The mean dietary score for pre-pregnancy using ED-II was 0.0, and 0.1 for pregnancy. The mean pre-pregnancy and pregnancy DASH was 24.3. 

Using various scales, the authors said the percentage of children classified as overweight and obese range from 8.1% to 21.6% during early-childhood, 6.4% to 23.8% during mid-childhood, and 7.0% to 19.1% during late-childhood.  

“We observed that higher maternal dietary quality during pregnancy was associated with a lower odds of late-childhood OWOB and lower FMI. In contrast, a more pro-inflammatory diet during pregnancy was associated with lower late-childhood FFMI,” Ling-Wei Chen, HRB Centre for Health and Diet Research, School of Public Health, Physiotherapy, and Sports Science, University College Dublin, and colleagues wrote.

Dietary score associations at the various stages of pregnancy were “quite similar,” which differed from their original hypothesis.  

“Our individual participant data meta-analysis within a large consortium suggests that pro-inflammatory, low-quality maternal pregnancy diets may adversely influence offspring adiposity and obesity risk, especially during late childhood. Promoting overall healthy dietary pattern during pregnancy may have lifelong consequences for the offspring,” Chen and colleagues wrote. 

The authors suggested that based on their findings, future studies should look at utero programming of childhood adiposity as most associations were found at mid-childhood or later.  


Reference: 
Chen LW, et al. Maternal dietary quality, inflammatory potential and childhood adiposity: an individual participant data pooled analysis of seven European cohorts in the ALPHABET consortium. BMC Med 19, 33 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-021-01908-7 
 
Images: Getty Images, Pixabay 
Disclosures: Some authors report industry ties. See full study for details. 

The research was supported by an award from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the ERA-Net Cofund of the Joint Programming Initiative Healthy Diet for Healthy Life (JPI-HDHL) action number 696295 (Biomarkers for Nutrition and Health). 


By Adam Hochron