Daily Times

Eating for two during pregnancy does no harm to babies in the long term, a study suggests. Women have long been warned not to put on too much weight while pregnant, with experts warning their baby could suffer as a result.

But a major study led by Aberdeen University suggests most women who put on weight during pregnancy do not see their children’s health affected over the long term.

Only a very extreme rate of weight gain significantly impacted their children’s health, the researchers found.

Experts examined data from 3,781 women who gave birth in Scotland between 1950 and 1956, and then analysed the heath records of their children until 2011.

The researchers, led by Dr Sohinee Bhattacharya of Aberdeen, found mothers’ weight gain during pregnancy had little impact on their offspring’s chance of having a heart attack, stroke or dying before their 60s.

Instead, they found, each person’s health was affected by their own lifestyle, rather than that of their mother.

Dr Bhattacharya, who team’s work is published in the BMJ journal Heart, said, “These findings are quite startling because what they show is that there is basically no relationship between mother’s weight gain in pregnancy and heart disease, or premature death in adulthood. Only in very extreme cases, where the mother had an exceptionally high weight gain, we found a higher risk of stroke in the adult offspring – however once we took the adults’ lifestyle factors into account – such as BMI and smoking status, this difference disappeared. So – this study provides a very important public health message – you can’t do very much about your mother’s weight gain in pregnancy, but if you lead a healthy life – you can mitigate any effects of this on your risk of having heart disease or dying prematurely.”

The NHS advises that pregnant women do not increase their eating in the first six months of pregnancy.

Only in the last three months do a woman’s food needs increase, and then only by around 200 calories per day.

The new research did not investigate the impact of weight gain on a mother’s own health.

Previous studies have found that women who pile on the pounds during pregnancy are more likely to develop gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and complications during the birth.

Dr Bhattacharya added, “How might this impact on clinical practice? Well for the first time, this large scale cohort study was able to show that adult health and lifestyle factors and not early life risk factors played the most important role in determining cardiovascular mortality and morbidity. Modifying these risk factors – obesity, smoking, diabetes – would constitute effective preventive strategy irrespective of maternal or early life factors.”