Watch Out for Junk Food You Are What You Eat!
THUNDER BAY – A diet of unhealthy foods, junk foods, can impact your health. At the same time, a diet of unhealthy choices by a pregnant mother to be can impact her child. Jessica Gugusheff from the FoodPlus research centre at the University of Adelaide, in Australia, the graduate student leading this research, says that “The results of this study will eventually permit us to better inform pregnant women about the enduring effect their diet has on the development of their child’s lifelong food preferences and risk of negative metabolic outcomes.”
Pregnant Moms and Junk Food
Scientist are uncovering that those choices, especially during pregnancy change the way that a baby’s brain works, and will alter those patterns for life. The findings are being presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB). This is one of the foremost societies for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, shows that eating a junk-food diet during pregnancy changes the development of the opioid signalling pathway in the baby’s brain and permanently alters the way this system operates after birth.
At issue are the chemicals which are released when people eat foods that are high in fat and sugar. It is the opioids that are released when we eat foods that are high in fat and sugar, and that are responsible for causing the release of another ‘feel good’ chemical, dopamine.
The scientists in developing their findings found that the gene encoding one of the key endogenous opioids, enkephalin, were expressed at a higher level in the offspring of mothers who had consumed a junk food diet than in the offspring of mothers who ate standard rat feed.
This increase in enkephalin, together with previous work done by this research group which showed that an opioid receptor blocker was less effective at reducing fat and sugar intake in the pups of the junk-food fed mothers, provides evidence for the first time that the opioid signalling pathway is less sensitive in junk-food exposed offspring.
Being less sensitive to opioids means that individuals whose mothers eat excessive quantities of junk-food during pregnancy and breastfeeding, would have to eat more junk foods get the same ‘feel good’ response, and this would make them more likely to over consume these high-fat, high-sugar foods.
Related articles
