Nutritional supplementation before and during pregnancy reduces early childhood obesity
Published: 06 Mar 2024
A boy with obesity is measuring his height and weight in the hospital.
In an important step towards understanding and preventing childhood obesity, researchers from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, University of Southampton, and University of Auckland have discovered that the nutrients mums receive before and during pregnancy can make a real difference to how much weight their children put on in their first years of life.
The research study is part of the NiPPeR study, that recruited soon-to-be mothers in three countries – Singapore, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Half the mothers in the study received an enriched supplement including vitamins B2, B6, B12, D, probiotics and myoinositol, in addition to ingredients of a standard pregnancy supplementation. The other half were in a control group and received standard pregnancy supplementation. Neither the mothers nor their medical teams knew which group they were in. Over 550 women delivered babies who were followed-up closely during infancy.
When researchers checked in on the children at age two years old, they found half as many children with obesity in the cohort whose mothers were in the enriched supplement group, compared to the control group (nine percent versus 18 percent). 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.
Co-author Associate Professor Chan Shiao-Yng from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at NUS Medicine, explained that the effects of a mother’s nutrition during pregnancy might not show in the baby right away. Early events, sometimes called foetal programming, can influence how the child reacts to an unhealthy lifestyle as he grows up, such as eating a lot of fatty food and not getting enough exercise which will lead to higher incidences of being overweight.
Childhood obesity is on the rise in many countries, particularly in less advantaged groups. There is an urgent need to prevent obesity because treating obesity is much more difficult. This new finding suggests that the period before and during pregnancy may provide a ‘special opportunity’ – a time when supporting better nutritional status for the mother could have lasting benefits for her child, added Prof Keith Godfrey, co-author and chief investigator of the NiPPeR Trial, from the University of Southampton.
For the next research stage, the team aims to identify which of the various nutrients in the supplement are producing the beneficial impacts in terms of reducing or preventing unhealthy weight gain.
Read more in the media release here.
