Found this at the dLife website. Thought it was timely since Jimmy is getting beat up over discussing a low carb, no carb diet during pregnancy.
http://www.dlife.com/diabetes-news/2008/..._moth.html
It's another mouse study where mice fed a high fat diet gave birth to overweight offspring. The hypothesis is that the high fat diet floods the fetus with nutrients.
Does this correlate to humans? There are problems with the high fat mouse chow that make these "studies" almost irrelevant.
They also make the observation:
Quote:"It's no secret that big women tend to have big babies," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, "but now we know that there's more at play than genetics. Cutting back on fatty foods during pregnancy might decrease the chance of having a baby that becomes overweight in the future."
Don't they know that sugar is converted to fat?? An overweight woman is likely eating too many carbs, which will definitely flood the fetus with excess nutrients. Women with gestational diabetes have big babies. Oh, we all "know" that insulin resistance and diabetes are related to fat intake. HA! HA! HA!
Since fat & cholesterol are essential for development, the advice to cut back on fatty foods during pregnancy may be dangerous. Yet, you will probably see new dietary guidelines for preganancy based on a possibly irrelevant mouse study. These low fat zealots just won't quit.
Fat is also used to form the baby's brain properly (as well as other tissues and hormones). If people want to REALLY take a risk to harm their babies, then by all means, cut the fat down. While 100 % of carb is energy source, this is not the case with protein or fat. Also with vitamins we have water soluble vitamins and F A T soluble vitamins; please note that there are NOT ANY CARB SOLUBLE vitamins or sugar/starch soluble vitamins. This works the same way with minerals, too. In fact, those ""evil"" SATURATED fats are even needed for proper assimilation of certain minerals and those ""artery-clogging"" sat fats are even essential for proper immune function!
http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats...t_fat.html
http://www.nourishingourchildren.org/par...isdom.html
Killing off the fat from your diet willingly while pregnant is irresponsible. We have well enough research and history to prove that this CAN AND DOES HARM NOT ONLY YOURSELF IN THE LONG RUN BUT ALSO A DELICATE UNBORN CHILD!
I wouldn't doubt worthless studies in which, if you look them up yourself (which I love doing), that you will find that the "high' fat diets fed to these lab mice would be hydrogenated fats/rancid fats possibly with a super high ratio of omega 3 to 6, as well as loading the poor guys with lots of processed corn and grains. Hardly a fair study.
Check out this post from the Migraineur. Psipisina is a migraine sufferer who is doing low carb. She was a member of the previous forum, but I haven't seen her on the new one. She recently became pregnant and reviews a pregnancy cookbook in this post. It's just the typical dietary advice and says pregnant women should limit egg yolks. Pspisina ask why. Low fat is just crammed down our throats as a one-size-fits-all dietary approach.
http://migraineur.wordpress.com/2008/09/...-cookbook/
Can't get the whole article without paying them, but the abstract has the following:
Quote:...female mice were fed a control (11% energy from fat) or HF (32% energy from fat) diet for 8 wk...
32% from fat is not my idea of high fat. 68% from what? Carbs? Also, what kind of fat was fed? What is the percentage of trans fats in that 32%? This doesn't even touch on the question of what did mice really evolve to eat, if they didn't evolve eating high fat (80% energy from fat) why would you be surprised if bad things happen when you feed them a diet high in fat?
Here is the study in question:
Helen N. Jones, Laura A. Woollett, Nicolette Barbour, Puttur D. Prasad, Theresa L. Powell, and Thomas Jansson
High-fat diet before and during pregnancy causes marked up-regulation of placental nutrient transport and fetal overgrowth in C57/BL6 mice
FASEB J. published Sep 30, 2008, doi:10.1096/fj.08-116889
Abstract:
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstra...8-116889v1
Full PDF if you want to pay for it:
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/rapidpdf/fj.08-116889v1
mrw549 Wrote:This doesn't even touch on the question of what did mice really evolve to eat, if they didn't evolve eating high fat (80% energy from fat) why would you be surprised if bad things happen when you feed them a diet high in fat?
That's a very astute observation! Some rats will get obese on a high-carb diet and some will get obese on a high-fat diet. I've found that the "high-fat" is usually a bunch of oils which presents other problems. You can practically discount all the high-fat rat studies because of the oil.
Regards,
Charles
Charles Wrote:mrw549 Wrote:This doesn't even touch on the question of what did mice really evolve to eat, if they didn't evolve eating high fat (80% energy from fat) why would you be surprised if bad things happen when you feed them a diet high in fat?
That's a very astute observation! Some rats will get obese on a high-carb diet and some will get obese on a high-fat diet. I've found that the "high-fat" is usually a bunch of oils which presents other problems. You can practically discount all the high-fat rat studies because of the oil.
Regards,
Charles
If I remember correctly, mice or rats natural diet is 6-8% fat. Think Taubes states this in GCBC somewhere.
The natural mouse diet is not low-fat, it's low-carb!
When the wild type (not genetically modified) mouse gets to self-select his diet, he chooses a diet of 82.5% of calories as fat. See Peter's post:
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2...-wild.html
On this diet he grows to a normal size while eating more calories.
It makes sense, as I suppose wild mice primarily live on insects?
So all of these "high-fat" lab diets they feed these poor mice are really
unnaturally low in fat and much higher in carbs (usually a sucrose/cornstarch mix) than what mice are designed to eat.
Mice have also been shown to get all kinds of benefits from a ketogenic diet.
The pups of mothers receiving high-fat diet were bigger and received an increased load of nutrients from the mom because of changes in the placenta.
Intake of calories was exactly the same in the control group and high-fat group. The high-fat diet caused the placenta to go into "overdrive", sending more nutrition to the fetus, leading to a larger baby pup.
No one is advocating zero fat in the diets of pregnant mothers, but it's fair to assume that most obese women in the U.S. intake too much fat. Any nutritionist will tell you the same. An important follow-up study to this would look at the so-called good fats and see if mice fed diets rich in these types of fats showed similar results.
And the point is not that the baby gets large from their mums eating a high-fat diet, and maintains that unhealthy weight through adulthood. Epidemiological studies show that larger babies are more likely to develop health conditions like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension. There is evidence backing the idea that the maternal environment is "programming" these babies to be prone to these types of diseases.
So this study is not part of an agenda to demonize fat, it simply demonstrates what changes in-utero under a high-fat diet to cause larger babies.
wentworther Wrote:No one is advocating zero fat in the diets of pregnant mothers, but it's fair to assume that most obese women in the U.S. intake too much fat. Any nutritionist will tell you the same. An important follow-up study to this would look at the so-called good fats and see if mice fed diets rich in these types of fats showed similar results.
Personally, I think an important follow-up study to this would look at the difference in fat intake between two groups of mice eating their natural diet (or close to it anyway), not rat chow. So sources of fat that would naturally be found in a mouse's diet were she not in a cage in a lab noshing on Purina. Maybe three groups - one with increased fat intake, one with increased carb intake, and one control.
I would also argue that it is fair to assume that most obese women in the US intake too much carbohydrate which, especially in conjunction with a higher level of fat, will lead to metabolic disorders a la Taubes, Atkins, Eades et al. Would the fat they eat be problematic if their carbohydrate intake were correspondingly low? According to all the studies I've seen, nope.