Has your baby bump become a holding tank for chips and chocolate bars? Back away from the snack food aisle. New research published in The FASEB Journal shows that women who chow down on junk food while pregnant give birth to junk food junkies.
Junk food stimulates the production of opioids in the body (the same opioids found in morphine and heroin), which can cross through the placenta and breast milk from mom to fetus. To investigate how exposure to these junk food-induced opioids during fetal development affect babies’ food habits, Australian researchers studied the pups of two groups of rats. During pregnancy and lactation, one group of moms had eaten normal critter food while the other ate a range of human junk foods including chocolate biscuits and potato chips.
Once the pups were weaned, the researchers injected them with an opioid receptor blocker to prevent the junk foods from stimulating the release of dopamine in their bodies. By curbing the junk foods’ feel-good effect, blocking opioid signaling lowers fat and sugar consumption.
Researchers found that the opioid receptor blocker was less effective at reducing fat and sugar intake in the pups of the junk-food-feeding mothers. Their mothers’ cruddy diet during pregnancy caused reduced sensitivity in the babies’ opioid signaling pathway. In turn, these babies, born with a higher tolerance to junk food, needed to eat more of it to achieve a junk-food high.
“In the same way that someone addicted to drugs has to consume more of the drug over time to achieve the same high, continually producing excess opioids by eating too much junk food also results in the need to consume more junk food to get the same pleasurable sensation,” says researcher Beverly Muhlhausler, Ph.D., from the FOODplus Research Centre at the School of Agriculture Food and Wine at The University of Adelaide in Australia.
A healthy diet during pregnancy and breastfeeding can give your child a healthy start, Muhlhausler says. Previous studies have shown that eating specific foods during pregnancy and breastfeeding can result in the child preferring those foods later in life. And a baby’s pre-birth nutrition can either prevent—or cause—chronic health conditions.
“When you’re pregnant, your baby is fondly called a ‘glucose sink,’” says Cassandra Forsythe Ph.D., RD, nutritionist specializing in pregnancy and postpartum nutrition and author of the Women’s Health Perfect Body Diet. “Whenever you eat sugary foods (think junk foods here), all the sugar sinks right into the baby, making them more insulin resistant, more likely to crave junk foods and more likely to struggle with their body weight, not to mention more likely to develop glucose disorders like diabetes.”
A poor diet during pregnancy increases the child’s risk of obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, autism, and attention deficit disorder, according to Victoria Maizes, MD, executive director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine author of Be Fruitful: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Fertility and Giving Birth to a Healthy Child. And adequate micronutrients, especially B vitamins, during fetal development reduce the risk of neural tube, cardiac, or other birth defects, she says.
Up to 90 percent of pregnant women report food cravings, and sweets are at the top of their list, according to Maizes. “To help manage cravings, consider giving in—but just to a small amount. A square of dark chocolate, a little scoop of ice cream, or a small piece of cake can satisfy the craving without destroying a healthy diet.” She suggests buying a single 2-ounce ice cream container when you are in need of sweet treat. (Don’t keep them in the house or they will disappear like crazy!) Also eat small, healthy meals throughout the day to help maintain healthy blood sugar levels, she says. That way you won’t raid the kitchen—or the Kwik-E-Mart—when that glucose sink of yours runs dry.
More from WH:
Can You Be Addicted to Pregnancy?
How to Have a Healthy Pregnancy
Advice for Getting Pregnant
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