Fast food diet before pregnancy can impact breast milk and babys health, say scientists

A diet high in sugar and fat such as burgers, fries and fizzy drinks can negatively affect a new mother’s breast milk and baby’s health even before the child is conceived.

The new study using lab mice has found that even relatively short-term consumption of a fast food diet impacts women’s health, reducing their ability to produce nutritional breast milk after giving birth. This can affect the newborn’s wellbeing, as well as increasing the risk of both mother and child developing potentially fatal conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes in later life.

Even mothers who appear to be a healthy weight can be suffering from hidden issues such as a fatty liver — which may be seen in people who are overweight or obese — from eating a diet heavy in processed foods, which tend to be high in fat and sugar. This can lead to advanced scarring (cirrhosis) and liver failure.

The new findings involved scientists from the Sferruzzi-Perri Lab at the Centre for Trophoblast Research, University of Cambridge, and The Department for the Woman and Newborn Health Promotion at the University of Chile in Santiago, and are published by the journal Acta Physiologica.

Co-lead author Professor Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, Professor in Fetal and Placental Physiology and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, said: “Women eating diets that tend to have high sugar and high fat content may not realise what impact that might be having on their health, especially if there’s not an obvious change in their body weight.

“They might have greater adiposity — higher levels of fat mass — which we know is a predictor of many health problems. That may not overtly impact on their ability to become pregnant, but could have consequences for the growth of the baby before birth, and the health and wellbeing of the baby after birth.”

It is already recognised that a ‘Western style’ diet high in fat and sugar is contributing to a pandemic of raised body mass index (BMI) and obesity not only in developed countries but also in developing nations undergoing urbanisation, including Chile. As a result, just over half of women (52.7%) in many populations around the world are overweight or obese when they conceive, leading to problems in both achieving and maintaining a healthy pregnancy.

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