WELLINGTON (AFP) – An expectant mother’s diet during pregnancy can alter her baby’s DNA in the womb, increasing its risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in later life, an international study has found.

Researchers said the study provided the first scientific evidence linking pregnant women’s diet to childhood obesity, with major implications for public health.

“This a a major breakthrough because for the first time it gives us the potential to work out the optimal diet a mother should eat,” Professor Peter Gluckman from Auckland University’s Liggins Institute told AFP.

“That’s likely to vary slightly from mother to mother, but it could be a major tool in addressing the obesity epidemic.”

The study, conducted by scientists in Britain, New Zealand and Singapore, showed that what a mother ate during pregnancy could change the function of her child’s DNA through a process called epigenetic change.

Children with a high degree of epigenetic change were more likely to develop a metabolism that “lays down more fat” and become obese, researchers found.

Such children were around three kilograms (6.6 pounds) heavier than their peers by the time they were aged six to nine, Gluckman said.

“That’s a hell of a lot of extra weight at that age,” he said, adding that the extra fat was likely to be carried into adulthood, raising the chances of developing diabetes and heart disease.

The researchers used umbilical cord tissue to measure the rate of epigenetic change in 300 babies, then examined whether it was linked to the children’s weight when they were aged six to nine.

“The correlation was very strong, we didn’t believe it at first, so we replicated it again and again,” Gluckman said.

The study found the effect was not linked to either the mother or the baby’s weight at birth, meaning a slim woman could deliver a small baby which still went on to became obese because of changes triggered by diet in the womb.

Gluckman said the rate of epigenetic change was possibly linked to a low carbohydrate diet in the first three months of pregnancy but it was too early to draw a definitive conclusion and further studies were needed.

He said one theory was that an embryo fed a diet containing few carbohydrates — which provide the body with energy — assumed it would be born into a carbohydrate-poor environment and altered its metabolism accordingly.

This meant it stored more fat, which could be used as fuel when food was scarce.

Gluckman said the study, which will be published in the journal Diabetes next week, confirmed long-held suspicions that poor prenatal nutrition could have a major impact on adult heath.

This meant health officials battling soaring obesity rates should look at policies designed to improve the health of expectant mothers, rather than simply focusing on trying to help overweight adults, he said.

“It provides the most compelling argument yet to give greater weight to improving maternal and infant health as a means of reducing the burden of chronic disease.”

FRIDAY, Jan. 14 (HealthDay News) — Young adults who are overweight or obese tend to befriend and date people who are also overweight or obese, new research indicates.

The finding echoes previous research that found health behaviors, and their results, “cluster” within social networks, said study author Dr. Tricia M. Leahey, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown Medical School and Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center in Providence, R.I.

“We found that overweight people do have more social contacts who are overweight and are more likely to have an overweight romantic partner or best friend,” Leahey said.

Overweight and obese youth in the same age group also tend to have more overweight relatives, although not more overweight classmates or colleagues. The study was published in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Obesity.

Previous research from Harvard Medical School has found that a person’s chance of becoming obese increases 57 percent if a friend becomes obese, 40 percent if a sibling becomes obese, and 37 percent if a spouse becomes obese.

While Leahey found that overweight young adults tend to have more overweight casual friends and social contacts then do normal weight young adults, there was a bright spot in her research. The results “suggest if [overweight young adults] have more social contacts trying to lose weight, they have greater intentions to lose weight” as well.

For the study, which included 151 participants of normal weight and 137 overweight or obese men and women, Leahey’s team asked the volunteers to complete questionnaires about their weight, height, the number of overweight social contacts and their perceived social norms for obesity and obesity-related behaviors.

Interestingly, she and her colleagues found that both the normal weight and overweight participants reported similarly low levels of social acceptability for being overweight, eating unhealthy foods and being inactive.

Why did those who had social contacts trying to lose weight say they were trying themselves to lose? Leahey says social norms for weight loss, such as encouragement from others and their approval for weight loss, account for the association.

The question about why overweight young adults have more overweight social contacts is less clear-cut. Researchers are not sure whether overweight people seek out other overweight people, or whether normal weight people who become friends with overweight people put on weight.

“It could go both ways,” Leahey said. “It could be overweight people tend to attract overweight [peers], or someone of normal weight gets into a relationship with someone overweight and they tend to gain weight,” she said, as they adopt the other person’s habits. In her opinion, “there is more evidence to suggest there is a social contagion, it’s contagious — [that is], “they get heavier once they develop a friendship or romance” with someone who is overweight.

The findings make sense to Michelle van Dellen, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, Athens, who has found in her own research a direct effect of peoples’ behavior on the eating habits of those around them. For instance, van Dellen found that participants who watched someone eat cookies instead of carrots did less well on self-control tests taken later than the participants who observed people choosing the carrots over the cookies.

The new research by Leahey, she said, suggests that it’s not only the behavior of social contacts that influence people’s own behavior, but also the goals of friends and partners. The contacts of the participants, she said, were overweight but some also were trying to lose weight. “That goal…appears to influence the person’s own behavior and their goals,” she said.

Goals are known to affect behavior, added van Dellen, whose own research suggests that self-control itself is contagious.

Leahy’s take-home message for overweight young adults, in fact, echoes this sentiment. “If you are an overweight or obese young adult, you might want to try losing weight with your social contacts who are also overweight or obese,” she said. “This age range seems to be more influenced [than older people] by the social network factor.”

More information

To learn more about social contagion theory, visit the Edge.

LONDON (Reuters) – More than 80,000 Britons claim payments for long-term sick leave because of obesity or drug or alcohol addiction, contributing to a 7 billion pound annual bill for Incapacity Benefit, the government said on Thursday.

Out of these, more than 21,200 alcoholics and drug addicts have been receiving the payments for over 10 years, according to the Department for Work and Pensions.

“Far from being the safety net it should be, the benefits system has trapped thousands of people in a cycle of addiction and welfare dependency with no prospect of getting back to work,” Employment Minister Chris Grayling said in a statement.

As part of its welfare reforms, the government has started reassessing the circumstances of 1.9 million people off work on Incapacity Benefit to see if they are fit enough to return to employment.

Ministers promise more help to those out of work but threaten sanctions against those who avoid getting a job.

The changes are politically risky and could provoke a public backlash, coming at a time of rising unemployment, state spending cuts and an economy weakened after a deep recession.

Dieters are a focused bunch: they calculate calories, sugar and fat content and conscientiously ask for salad dressing on the side. Right? Not exactly. According to a new study, dieters actually tend to make snap judgments about the healthfulness of food based solely on its label, instead of its ingredients.

“Over time, dieters learn to focus on simply avoiding foods that they recognize as forbidden based on product name,” said the authors, Caglar Irmak, assistant professor of marketing at University of South Carolina; Beth Vallen, assistant professor of marketing at Loyola University Maryland; and Stefanie Rosen Robinson, a graduate student at University of South Carolina, in a statement (PDF). “Thus, dieters are likely to assume that an item assigned an unhealthy name (for example, pasta) is less healthy than an item assigned a healthy name (for example, salad), and they do not spend time considering other product information that might impact their product evaluations.”

Given the ubiquity of health-washed products currently on store shelves – potato chips marketed as “veggie chips,” milk shakes sold as “smoothies,” sugary drinks repositioned as “flavored water” – that could lead to a lot of confusion, the authors said.

(More on TIME.com: “Why Looking at Overweight People Makes Us Want to Eat More, Not Less”)

In a series of experiments, the researchers asked participants – some who were dieting, some who weren’t – to evaluate the relative healthfulness and tastiness of foods, and measured those ratings against how much people consumed. In one experiment, people were asked to imagine ordering from a lunch menu and to gauge how healthy either the “daily salad special” or the “daily pasta special” was. They were given ingredient lists and photos of the entrees, which were actually exactly the same – both contained romaine lettuce, diced tomatoes, onions, red peppers, pasta shells, salami, mozzarella cheese and a savory herb vinaigrette. Both totaled 900 calories, with 60 grams of fat. The only difference was that one was called a salad, and the other, pasta.

The label alone was enough to influence the dieters’ – but not the nondieters’ – ratings. When the product was called pasta, the dieters rated it as significantly less healthy than nondieters did. Interestingly, however, when it was given the “healthy” name, salad, it led to no difference in rating between the two groups. (But, overall, dieters believed the same dish, when called salad, was healthier.)

That’s because dieters tend to be more sensitive to certain taboo food names – like pasta, ice cream, potato chips and candy – than people who aren’t constantly watching their weight, and are more motivated to avoid them. On the flip side, however, their judgment of healthy-sounding foods is no different from nondieters’. So the typical dieter’s strategy isn’t necessarily to eat more good foods, but rather to avoid bad ones.

(More on TIME.com: “Health-Washing: Is ‘Healthy’ Fast Food for Real?”)

Why aren’t nondieters as easily fooled by product labels? The authors write:

It is important to note here that we do not believe that the reason nondieters’ ratings are immune to the impact of food name is that these individuals tend to evaluate foods more systematically than dieters. In fact, we argue that the reason the product name does not influence nondieters’ evaluations is that they have neither the motivation to spontaneously evaluate the healthfulness of foods nor the implicit associations between certain food categories and healthfulness that dieters do.

In other words, people who aren’t preoccupied with weight loss simply care less about this stuff.

In another experiment, dieters and nondieters were asked to rate the healthfulness and tastiness of sour Jelly Belly jelly beans – presented as either “fruit chews” or “candy chews.” Not only were dieters more likely to rate the candy chews as less healthy and less tasty than nondieters did, but also, ironically, they ate more of the snack when it was referred to as fruit chews.

(More on TIME.com: “Can a Mother’s Pregnancy Diet Influence Her Child’s Future Weight?”)

Seems as though dieters are so busy avoiding a long list of “forbidden” foods that they’re failing to take note of what really matters: the product’s ingredients, not the marketing hype.

The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

View this article on Time.com

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LONDON (Reuters) – More than 80,000 Britons claim payments for long-term sick leave because of obesity or drug or alcohol addiction, contributing to a 7 billion pound annual bill for Incapacity Benefit, the government said on Thursday.

Out of these, more than 21,200 alcoholics and drug addicts have been receiving the payments for over 10 years, according to the Department for Work and Pensions.

“Far from being the safety net it should be, the benefits system has trapped thousands of people in a cycle of addiction and welfare dependency with no prospect of getting back to work,” Employment Minister Chris Grayling said in a statement.

As part of its welfare reforms, the government has started reassessing the circumstances of 1.9 million people off work on Incapacity Benefit to see if they are fit enough to return to employment.

Ministers promise more help to those out of work but threaten sanctions against those who avoid getting a job.

The changes are politically risky and could provoke a public backlash, coming at a time of rising unemployment, state spending cuts and an economy weakened after a deep recession.

(Reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; Editing by Steve Addison)

THURSDAY, Feb. 10 (HealthDay News) — Low levels of education and income, but not suburban sprawl, are associated with higher rates of obesity, researchers report.

The finding challenges the widely held view that people who live in cities tend to be thinner because they have more opportunities to walk, while people in suburban and rural areas have to drive most everywhere they go.

For this study, researchers analyzed data from about 7 million people in rural and urban counties in Illinois, including residents in the metropolitan Chicago area.

Within zip codes, increased rates of obesity were associated with being older and being male, along with the percentage of people who commute by car, are black or Hispanic, or own their homes, said the researchers at the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Rates of obesity were lower in zip codes with higher median income and more residents who had attended college.

The findings could prove helpful in urban planning, according to research assistant professor Paul Metaxatos.

“Ambitious land use policies to address obesity may have little success with the low-income ethnic minorities who are most in need of assistance,” he said in a university news release. “Those in marginal, transportation-disadvantaged communities would benefit from better access to medical help, better food markets and information about lifestyle modification.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about the causes and consequences of overweight and obesity.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Kidney failure is a main complication of diabetes, but a lab study on mice showed that a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet could reverse that in eight weeks, US researchers said Wednesday.

The extreme food plan is known as a ketogenic diet and is often used to treat children with drug-resistant epilepsy. It starves the body of carbs and sugars, thereby tricking the body into burning fat for fuel instead of glucose.

The diet is so restrictive it must be devised with an expert’s help. Meal options may include scrambled eggs with cream, a bacon and butter omelet, or lettuce doused in mayonnaise.

Doctors theorized the diet might work for diabetics by blocking the toxic effects of glucose, a simple sugar made as the body metabolizes food but that can become harmful in diabetics who lack enough insulin to regulate it.

So the team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York took two groups of mice that were genetically predisposed to having Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. Half were fed a standard, high-carb diet while the other half received a ketogenic diet.

After eight weeks, kidney failure was reversed in the ketogenic-fed mice, said the study published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

“Our study is the first to show that a dietary intervention alone is enough to reverse this serious complication of diabetes,” said lead author Charles Mobbs at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

“This finding has significant implications for the tens of thousands of Americans diagnosed with diabetic kidney failure, and possibly other complications, each year.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, 24 million people in the United States have diabetes, and close to 180,000 people are living with kidney failure linked to their diabetes.

Mobbs said the diet is not likely to be suitable as a long-term fix in humans, but said the findings indicate even as little as a month on the regime could be enough to “reset” the body and avoid kidney failure.

Mobbs said the findings should “help us identify a drug target and subsequent pharmacological interventions that mimic the effect of the diet.”

His team is planning more studies to explore the ketogenic diet’s impact on other neurological diseases such as retinopathy which causes loss of sight.

CHICAGO – People with diabetes should mix aerobics with weight training to get the best results in lowering blood sugar, a new study suggests. The combination worked best for weight loss too, compared to aerobics or weight training alone.

Blood sugar is fuel to muscles, and more sugar is burned during aerobic activity. Weight training builds more muscle, and both activities change muscle proteins in ways that enhance the process.

“It’s clear that doing both aerobic and strength training is superior to either alone,” said lead author Dr. Tim Church of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. “It’s almost like taking two different drugs.”

Patients in the study, published in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, achieved the results over nine months, exercising three days a week for about 45 minutes each session.

“People can manage this amount of exercise,” said Laurie Goodyear of Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who wasn’t involved in the new study but does similar research. “They didn’t have to go on a diet. This was purely an exercise effect.”

The researchers’ goal was to test three exercise programs that doctors could realistically recommend and patients could stick with. They compared aerobics alone, weight training alone and a combination. U.S. guidelines recommend aerobics and weight training combined for all adults.

All three groups worked out for about the same amount of time. A fourth group of patients was offered only weekly stretching and relaxation classes for further comparison. The study was completed by 245 people with diabetes.

Led by trainers, patients walked on a treadmill that raised the uphill grade by 2 percent every two minutes for the aerobics. Weight training, also supervised, was done on machines that worked muscles in the upper body and legs, with more weight added as participants increased their strength.

“It gave me a lot more energy. That was one of the first things I noticed,” said Deidra Atkins-Ball, 44, a biology professor, diagnosed with diabetes a year before she joined the aerobics-weights group.

A distant aunt with diabetes lost both legs and her vision to the disease. Too much blood sugar can damage nerves, eyes, the heart and blood vessels.

“I remember as a kid having to do things for her, going to the store for her,” Atkins-Ball said. “It really scared me.”

The researchers found that only the group that combined aerobics and weights both lowered their blood sugar and lost weight, although all three fitness groups reduced their waist sizes.

Fewer patients in the combo group started taking new diabetes drugs than in the other groups. Decisions on medications were left up to the patients’ regular doctors during the study.

Forty-one percent of the patients in the combo group either decreased their diabetes medications or lowered their average blood sugar as measured by a common blood test, compared to 26 percent for weights only, 29 percent for aerobics only and 22 percent in the non-exercise group.

The blood sugar reduction achieved by the combo group was enough to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other complications, the researchers wrote, citing earlier studies.

Atkins-Ball’s results were good, if not long-lasting. She dropped 4 pounds and saw her blood sugar reach near normal levels. When the program ended, she joined a gym and kept exercising — for a while.

Then she got busy, let her gym membership lapse after a year and has seen her blood sugar levels climb. She’s now taking two diabetes drugs, instead of the one she took during the study.

Atkins-Ball is trying to get back into an exercise routine by walking two miles with her husband in the mornings. Her advice for others with diabetes is to get into a structured exercise program.

“That’s what helped me the most,” she said.

___

Online:

JAMA: http://jama.ama-assn.org

MONDAY, Feb. 7 (HealthDay News) — Babies who were formula-fed and introduced to solid foods before they were 4 months old were more likely to be obese when they were 3, researchers report.

The timing of solid foods didn’t increase the odds of becoming obese in youngsters who were breast-fed. But among children who were never breast-fed — or who stopped breast-feeding before the age of 4 months — introducing solid foods before 4 months of age was linked to a sixfold increase in the risk of obesity, according to the research, which was published online Feb. 7 and will appear in the March print issue of Pediatrics.

“Our study results suggest that adhering to the current American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines of waiting till 4 months to introduce solids has the potential to reduce the risk of obesity later on,” explained study author Dr. Susanna Y. Huh, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Early feeding practices are believed to set the stage for later eating patterns and weight status later in life. But, previous studies hadn’t provided consistent answers as to whether or not the timing of the introduction of solid foods could make a difference in a child’s weight later in life, according to background information in the study, which was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

For this study, the researchers reviewed data on 847 children enrolled in Project Viva, a long-term study of women and their offspring. The women were initially recruited before the birth of their babies, and they were followed for at least three years.

The researchers found that 67 percent of the children were breast-fed and 32 percent were formula-fed. When the youngsters were 3 years old, 9 percent were considered obese.

Babies who were fed formula, and then introduced to solids foods before they were 4 months old, were 6.3 times more likely to be obese when they were 3 years old — an association that was not explained by early rapid growth.

No such association was found for the breast-fed infants.

“Among breast-fed infants, the timing of the introduction of solids didn’t seem to matter,” said study co-author Sheryl L. Rifas-Shiman, a research associate at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute in Boston.

Huh said it’s not clear why the introduction of solids before 4 months appeared to make such a significant difference for the formula-fed babies. But, the researchers theorize that “mothers of infants who are breast-fed may better understand and recognize their babies hunger and satiety cues. Mothers of formula-fed infants may not recognize these as well,” said Huh.

“This study reinforces a lot of things we normally recommend,” said Dr. Goutham Rao, director of the weight management and wellness center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. “Breast-feeding is best, and it’s a useful way to make sure your child is healthy. In terms of solid food introduction, it’s wise to delay it until 4 to 6 months,” he said.

But, there are other things that parents need to do to keep their children healthy and at a proper weight, he said.

“What is it about the introduction of solid food early that is associated with obesity? Does the family have other unhealthy behaviors? Maybe they’re allowing the child to eat fast food at two. Giving cereal at an early age may be a marker for something else that wasn’t measured in this study,” he explained.

To keep your child at a healthy weight, Rao said it’s a good idea to stick with the AAP recommendations of introducing solids at 4 to 6 months. He also said that parents should introduce cereals and vegetables before introducing sweet foods. He advised not giving children high sugar or high fat foods, and said it’s important to stay in tune with your child’s hunger cues.

“A good rule for portion size is that a meal should be about the size of a child’s fist,” he said.

More information

Learn about the right way to introduce solid foods from the American Academy of Pediatrics.