The decision to start a family prompts many women to begin embracing a healthier diet well before receiving a positive pregnancy test. But a recent study points to another important benefit of following a healthy diet before becoming pregnant.
The study, published in February in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that women who eat a diet high in animal fat and cholesterol before pregnancy are at greater risk for developing gestational diabetes than women whose diets are lower in animal fat and cholesterol.
According to the study, the increased risk for gestational diabetes associated with animal fat and cholesterol appears to be independent of other risk factors for gestational diabetes. For example, exercise is known to reduce the risk of gestational diabetes. Among women who exercised, however, those whose diets were high in animal fat and cholesterol had a higher risk for gestational diabetes than those whose diets were lower in those types of fat.
Gestational diabetes, a form of diabetes seen during pregnancy, increases the risk for certain pregnancy complications and health problems in the newborn. According to the National Institutes of Health, gestational diabetes happens in about 5 percent of all pregnancies. Women who have had gestational diabetes and children whose mothers had gestational diabetes are at a higher lifetime risk for obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
Conducted by researchers at NIH and Harvard University, the study found that replacing just 5 percent of a woman’s calories from animal fat with plant-derived sources could decrease her risk for gestational diabetes by 7 percent. Not all fats are culprits, however. In fact, women whose diets were high in other kinds of fats before conception, but not in animal fat or cholesterol, were not at an increased risk for gestational diabetes, the study found.
“Our findings indicate that women who reduce the proportion of animal fat and cholesterol in their diets before pregnancy may lower their risk for gestational diabetes during pregnancy,” said study author Chilin Zhang, MD, PhD, MPH, a researcher at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
To create the study, researchers gathered information from more than 13,000 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study II. Every two years, study participants answered questions about their general health, pregnancy status and lifestyle habits, such as alcohol and tobacco use. In addition, every four years, study participants completed a comprehensive survey about the kinds of food and drink they consumed.
About 6 percent of the participants reported having been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The researchers calculated the amount of animal fat in participants’ diets as a percentage of total calories and divided participants into five groups based on those percentages. Then the researchers compared the risk for developing gestational diabetes for each group. Women in the group with the highest consumption of animal fat had almost double the risk for gestational diabetes compared to women in the lowest group.
Researchers also observed that women in the highest group for cholesterol consumption were 45 percent more likely to develop gestational diabetes than were women in the lowest group.
The study is the largest to date of the effects of a pre-pregnancy diet on gestational diabetes, according to the study’s authors, who noted that additional research may lead to increased understanding of how a mother’s diet before and during pregnancy influences her metabolism during pregnancy, which may have important implications for the baby’s health at birth and later in life.
For more information or to obtain a copy of the study, visit www.ajcn.org.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
