Whether they drink sugary sodas like “light”, women with gestational diabetes put their children at the same risk of obesity.
Expectant mothers suffering from gestational diabetes should limit their sugar intake, especially by avoiding sugary drinks. In addition to the pregnancy complications it promotes, regular consumption of sodas is associated with a risk of overweight at birth, then childhood obesity, and therefore subsequently cardiovascular complications, diabetes or certain cancers.
Pregnant women have the natural reflex to replace them with light versions, with sweeteners. A false good idea, according to researchers at the American Institute of Health (NIH) who publish the results of a study in theInternational Journal of Epidemiology.
They have indeed shown that pregnant women who consumed one can of diet soda per day during their pregnancy put their children at the same risk as with sugary sodas.
Twice as obese
The American researchers used a Danish cohort of more than 90,000 women who gave birth between 1996 and 2002, followed during their pregnancy and until their child reached the age of 7 years. Of these, 900 had developed gestational diabetes, and of these, 9% reported drinking at least one sweetened drink per day.
Their children were then twice as likely to be obese by the age of 7. At birth, 60% of them were already overweight.
“Our results suggest that replacing sugary drinks with sweetened drinks during pregnancy does not reduce the risk of obesity in future children,” summarizes Cuilin Zhang, an NIH epidemiologist and lead author of the study.
Get in the water
Research has so far not been able to explain these similarities in the effects of consuming sugary and sweetened drinks, observed in several studies on obesity. Modification of the intestinal flora or the capacity of the intestine to absorb glucose, impairment of satiety… Hypotheses have been put forward, but the explanations remain thin.
Sweeteners are therefore not a quick fix, either for overweight people or for women with gestational diabetes. It is better to go directly to the water, concludes Cuilin Zhang.
A habit not necessarily easy to adopt, especially in pregnant women, whose thirst reaches its peaks during the period of increase in the volume of amniotic fluid.
.
