Mom’s Obesity Influences Kid’s Weight

Scientists at two ARS-funded nutrition research centers are examining how maternal influences of the unborn child and the developing newborn could increase the risk that the child would become an overweight or obese adult. In turn, that adult would have a higher risk of obesity-related afflictions such as type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease...

At the ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston another researcher is studying the “epigenetic mechanism” link to obesity. The researchers studied a population of genetically similar laboratory mice known for their genetic tendency toward obesity. The findings suggest that “an epigenetic mechanism may act to increase the severity of obesity from one generation to the next.” This “transgenerational amplification of obesity” occurred in three successive generations of mice. Specifically, overweight dams gave birth to even-more-overweight offspring, the females of which gave birth to even heavier pups, and so on, through generation three.

Reported in the International Journal of Obesity, the study showed that the mothers’ obesity apparently induced changes in the expression of genes that control the formation of the pups’ body-weight-regulating mechanisms. That likely took place in the womb and perhaps in the weeks thereafter, setting the pups on the path to obesity.