Diet And Pregnancy: High Fat Foods Affect Baby's Risk Of Substance Abuse

Of course health officials are well aware that a woman's diet during pregnancy can ultimately influence her child's life and development later. Yet did you know that her diet, too, may affect her future child's likelihood of alcohol or nicotine use later in life?

Researchers at Rockefeller University found that a mother's consumption of a fat-rich diet during pregnancy increased her offspring's risk of both alcohol and nicotine abuse during adolescence, when examined during a rat study.

During the study, researchers developed a new study approach that involved training the rats to press a lever in order to receive small infusions through an intravenous (IV) tube of either alcohol or nicotine alone, or in combination. With this method, they began avidly working for the drug, with the confounding factors from alcohol's bitter taste being eliminated.

Findings revealed that maternal consumption of a high-fat diet resulted in the offspring treating nicotine as more rewarding, particularly when it was combined with alcohol, compared to offspring of mothers who had a low-fat diet. Furthermore, when a test required that the young rats work progressively harder with the lever pressing, the fat-exposed rats kept working to obtain the next dose after the control rats gave up.

Rats whose mothers ate a higher fat diet while pregnant also consumed larger amounts of a alcohol plus nicotine mixture than just the nicotine mixture alone, which was not the case for those in the low-fat control group.

More information regarding the findings were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior.

Related Articles

Pregnancy And Epilepsy: Premature Birth Risk Higher With Seizures

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).