Pregnancy weight gain may affect children’s weight

Watch your weight – for your child’s sake…

Your weight and the amount of weight you gain during your pregnancy may raise your daughter’s risk of obesity in adulthood decades later, according to a new study. “The findings are especially important because of the growing epidemic of obesity in women,” says study leader Dr Alison Stuebe, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “If we can help women reach a healthy weight before they start a family, we can make a difference for two generations.”

The study analyzed data on moms’ recalled weights and weight gain for more than 24,000 mother-daughter pairs. The heavier a mom was before she became pregnant, the more likely her daughter was to be obese in later life. For instance, an average-height mother who weighed 150 pounds before pregnancy was twice as likely to have a daughter who was obese at age 18 as a mother who weighed 125 pounds before pregnancy.

Weight gain during pregnancy also made a difference, with too much weight gain increasing a daughter’s risk of becoming obese. Those daughters whose moms gained 15 to 19 pounds during pregnancy had the lowest risk of obesity. Compared to this group, daughters whose moms gained more than 40 pounds while pregnant were almost twice as likely to be obese at age 18 and later in life. Strangely, too little weight gain was also linked with a daughter’s obesity risk – pregnancy weight gain of less than 10 pounds was associated with a 1.5-fold increase in the odds of being obese at 18 and a 1.3-fold increase in odds of being obese in later life.

The study was published June 16, 2009, in the online version of the International Journal of Obesity.

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