Mum Makes You Fat

You knew it all along, right? Not because of her scrummy cooking either.

This news comes from Professor Margaret Morris of the Uni of New South Wales in Australia. She found that the children of women who are overweight before or during their pregnancy are more likely to have increased appetites, and therefore obesity. The mother’s diet affects the baby’s brain circuits.

Apparently this supports results from a British study last year which found that mums who eat junk food during pregnancy are likely to have children who also crave junk food.

Now I’m no professor, and the story comes from The Courier Mail (27 Jan 2008) which is likely taking the details from a press release and not the study.

But I wonder if the researchers considered the case of the Agouti mice?

These little wonders have yellow coats, coded by a gene called Agouti. This gene is related to a human gene that is expressed in people who suffer from type 2 diabetes and obesity. The Agouti mice also eat ravenously, have an increased tendency to experience cancer and diabetes, and to die early. Their babies are also prone to these conditions.

Randy Jirtle, a professor of radiation oncology at Duke University in the USA, discovered that by changing the expression of their genes, he could make Agouti mums produce slender, dark coated, offspring. Just before conception he fed the mums a diet loaded with a chemical known as “methyl groups”, which inhibit the expression of genes. And voila, thin mice.

Genes express when an outside factor stimulates a gene to construct, assemble, or alter products within a cell using proteins.

Maybe the two studies are saying the same thing? We know the brain pathways that control appetite, and many other things of course, are altered at specific points in the brain development, such as birth and puberty and again at physical maturity (around age 24).

So I’d love to read the whole UNSW study and see what it actually says. I’ll put that on my list…….

As an aside, the language in the story is horrible, actually. It says, “ the research suggest women who are overweight……may be condemning their children to a life of overeating and obesity.” The usual media-speak, sadly – no recognition that the current opinions of extra weight are a fashion trend (albeit one that’s increasingly hysterical) and have NO relation to physical health at all.

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