Nutrition During Pregnancy
Nutrition During Pregnancy
The Nutrition during Pregnancy Study is collaboration between Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Children’s Hospital Boston, funded by the NIH and Thrasher Research Fund. The goal of the study is to compare the impact of the current standard nutrition recommendations for a healthy pregnancy to a novel dietary approach that aims to reduce blood glucose levels after meals among women at high risk for having a large baby due to overweight or obesity. The research is led by Tamara Takoudes, MD, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and researchers Erinn Rhodes, MD MPH (Study Director), Dorota Pawlak PhD, and David Ludwig, MD, PhD at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Nutrition during pregnancy has been hypothesized to have long-lasting effects on an infant’s predisposition to chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. When born larger and heavier than average, infants are more likely to be heavier in childhood and frequently become overweight adults. Professional health organizations have established comprehensive nutritional guidelines for pregnancy that include consumption of a moderately low fat, low saturated fat, high complex carbohydrate diet. These diets are typically recommended without consideration of glycemic index (GI). Consumption of a high glycemic load (GL) diet leads to high blood glucose levels after meals and may affect growth of the baby and its long-term predisposition to obesity.
In this randomized clinical trial, the goal is to compare the effects of a conventional low fat diet routinely recommended in pregnancy to a low GL load diet on infant birth weight and other measures of fetal growth among overweight/obese pregnant women. The hypothesis is that women who consume a low GL diet during the second and/or third trimester of pregnancy will have infants with a lower birth weight than women who consume a conventional low fat diet and that these women and their offspring will have better outcomes related to risk for obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The primary study endpoint is infant birth weight, and secondary endpoints include maternal weight gain; maternal body composition; maternal cardiovascular disease risk factors such as blood pressure, and serum triglyceride, HDL cholesterol; infant body composition and markers and of fetal growth; and biochemical markers of inflammation and growth from cord blood. Subjects were recruited between January 2007 and June 2009, and data collection will be complete in December 2009.
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