Eating for two won’t do any harm to baby

... as long as they keep fit in later life

MOTHErS hoping to shed their baby weight have long been warned not to eat for two while pregnant.

But a study suggests that piling on the pounds does no long-term harm to their baby.

While some experts have previously warned that weight gain could cause the infant’s health to suffer, a study led by Aberdeen University suggests this is not the case.

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

Experts examined data from 3,781 women who gave birth in Scotland between 1950 and 1956,

‘You can mitigate any effects’

then analysed the heath records of their children until 2011.

The researchers, led by Dr Sohinee Bhattacharya, found mothers’ weight gain during pregnancy had little impact on their offspring’s chances 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, whose 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 women do not eat more in the first six months of pregnancy. Only in the last three months do they need 200 extra calories a day.

The 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, pre-eclampsia and birth complications.

Dr Bhattacharya added: ‘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.’