The Relationship Between Maternal Dietary Patterns During Pregnancy In Women With Gestational Diabetes Mellitus And Infant Appetitive Feeding Behaviors At 6 Months
Infant appetitive behavior includes traits like responsiveness to food, time take to consume a meal, response towards satiety. Previous evidence suggests that maternal feeding affects an infant’s appetitive feeding behavior. However, maternal dietary patterns in women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and their relationship with appetitive traits of their offspring are not yet examined.
The author Amissah and colleagues (2020) conducted a study titled “The relationship between maternal dietary patterns during pregnancy in women with gestational diabetes mellitus and infant appetitive feeding behavior at 6 months” published in “The Nature Journal”. The summary of this study is given below:
Objective:
To examine dietary patterns of women with GDM in late pregnancy.
To study appetitive feeding behavior in their infants .
To investigate the relationship between the dietary patterns of women with GDM and the appetitive feeding behavior of their infant.
Method:
The study analyzed data collected from 325 mother-infant pairs. The maternal dietary patterns in women with GDM is assessed at 36 weeks of gestation using principal component analysis. By using the Baby Eating Behavior Questionnaire, information about infant appetitive feeding behavior was collected at 6 months of age. The relationship between these is analyzed using general linear modelling and chi-square tests.
Findings:
The study identified three distinct maternal dietary patterns, namely ‘Junk,’ ‘Mixed,’ and ‘Health-conscious’. The infants in this cohort study were found to have high enjoyment of food scores and less than 5% had high food responsiveness. Investigators report inverse relation between ‘health-conscious’ maternal dietary pattern and ‘enjoyment of food’ in boys but not in girls. Additionally, ‘health-conscious’ maternal dietary pattern was positively related to ‘slowness in eating’ at 6 months of age. Hence, the risk of overweight/obesity is less in later life in the offspring of GDM women with this dietary pattern while the reason for this sex-specific outcome remains unclear.
As offspring of women with GDM are at high risk of obesity, appropriate dietary advice during pregnancy can be a public health recommendation.
Limitation:
Authors acknowledge that there may be introduced recall and social desirability bias while the study relies on maternal self-report of dietary intake and infant feeding behavior, and not on observed measures of data collection.
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