Dieting While Pregnant Accelerates Baby’s Brain Aging

Scientists from the University of Amsterdam have found that increasing the diet of a pregnant woman adversely affects the health of her baby. Namely, the limitation of food to the mother leads to a rapid aging of the baby’s brain.

For this experiment, scientists chose a group of people born in the Netherlands during the so-called “Hunger winter” of 1944, when the country was terribly hungry due to World War II. During this period, the diet of pregnant women was extremely poor and did not exceed the daily calorie content of 600-800 kcal.

The first such test was conducted in 1970-ies, but no major difference between the control group and the subjects was found. A second test, conducted after 40 years during which participants were asked to name the color of a word without thinking about its meaning, showed that people born after 1944 performed poorly in the test. Moreover, the control group did not experience such problems.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded that the degradation of the nerve tissues of the brain occurs faster in people whose mothers restricted their diet or were addicted to dieting during pregnancy.

Source of the image: Photl.