Obesity is an increasingly common disease among pregnant women. Just today we talked about the growing number of babies born to diabetic moms, mostly due to their obesity.
One study, one of the first carried out in this field, has compared the body composition of newborns with the maternal body mass index (BMI) before pregnancy.
Researchers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center found that Babies of overweight or obese mothers have more fat and less muscle than the children of women of normal weight.
They also pointed out that more and more babies in Europe and the United States are born with high birth weight, that is, 4 kg or more, large babies with a propensity for obesity in the future.
Newborn babies have been measured with a novel system (PEA POD) that measures the percentage of body fat, lean body mass and fat mass. They indicate that this would be a more accurate way of measuring the baby's health than simply observing the value that the scale marks.
Babies of obese women have less muscle mass, which could increase the risk of diabetes, since muscles are the body's major sugar consumers.
The study authors stressed the importance of promoting breastfeeding to prevent obesity because babies fed with formula milk tend to be more overweight.
With breastfeeding I can not agree more, but it is also important for the health of the future baby for the mother to adopt healthy habits both before and during pregnancy.
