18 research outputs found
The impact of diet during adolescence on the neonatal health of offspring:evidence on the importance of preconception diet. The HUNT study
Emerging evidence suggests that parentsâ nutritional status before and at the time of conception influences the lifelong physical and mental health of their child. Yet little is known about the relationship between diet in adolescence and the health of the next generation at birth. This study examined data from Norwegian cohorts to assess the relationship between dietary patterns in adolescence and neonatal outcomes. Data from adolescents who participated in the Nord-TrĂžndelag Health Study (Young-HUNT) were merged with birth data for their offspring through the Medical Birth Registry of Norway. Young-HUNT1 collected data from 8980 adolescents between 1995 and 1997. Linear regression was used to assess associations between adolescentsâ diet and later neonatal outcomes of their offspring adjusting for sociodemographic factors. Analyses were replicated with data from the Young-HUNT3 cohort (dietary data collected from 2006 to 2008) and combined with Young-HUNT1 for pooled analyses. In Young-HUNT1, there was evidence of associations between dietary choices, meal patterns, and neonatal outcomes, these were similar in the pooled analyses but were attenuated to the point of nonsignificance in the smaller Young-HUNT3 cohort. Overall, energy-dense food products were associated with a small detrimental impact on some neonatal outcomes, whereas healthier food choices appeared protective. Our study suggests that there are causal links between consumption of healthy and unhealthy food and meal patterns in adolescence with neonatal outcomes for offspring some years later. The effects seen are small and will require even larger studies with more state-of-the-art dietary assessment to estimate these robustly
Diet matters, particularly in pregnancy â Results from MoBa studies of maternal diet and pregnancy outcomes
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This article is open access.Awareness that maternal diet may influence the outcome of pregnancy as well as the long-term health of mother and child has increased in recent years. A new food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was developed and validated specifically for the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). The MoBa FFQ is a semi-quantitative tool which covers the average intake of food, beverages and dietary supplements during the first 4 to 5 months of pregnancy. It includes questions about intakes of 255 foods and dishes and was used from 2002 onwards. Data assessed by the MoBa FFQ is available for 87,700 pregnancies. Numerous sub-studies have examined associations between dietary factors and health outcomes in MoBa. The aim of this paper is to summarize the results from 19 studies of maternal diet and pregnancy outcomes, which is the complete collection of studies based on the MoBa FFQ and published before September 2014. The overall research question is whether maternal diet â from single substances to dietary patterns â matters for pregnancy outcome. The pregnancy outcomes studied till now include birth size measures, infants being small and large for gestational age, pregnancy duration, preterm delivery, preeclampsia, as well as maternal gestational weight gain and postpartum weight retention. As a whole, the results from these studies corroborate that the current dietary recommendations to pregnant women are sound and that maternal diet during pregnancy is likely to contribute to reduce the risk of pregnancy complications including preterm birth, preeclampsia, and reduced foetal growth. The results provide supporting evidence for recommending pregnant women to consume vegetables, fruit, whole grain, fish, dairy, and water regularly and lower the intake of sugar sweetened beverages, processed meat products and salty snacks. The results showing negative impact of even low levels of environmental contaminants support the precautionary advice on consumption of foods containing these. New findings are that particularly lean fish explained the positive association between seafood intake and foetal growth, and the indications of a protective effect of probiotic and antimicrobial foods on pregnancy outcomes. This points to the importance of diet composition for a healthy gut flora and the bodyâs immune response. Although these studies are observational and cannot infer causality, the results identify diet as an important modifiable lifestyle factor, suggesting that healthy eating, defined as following the official recommendations, is particularly important in pregnanc
Evaluation of an eHealth intervention aiming to promote healthy food habits from infancy -the Norwegian randomized controlled trial Early Food for Future Health
Confirmatory factor analysis for the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire; factor loadings for all items and Cronbach alpha scores for each factor structure. (PDF 210 kb
Preeclampsia and gestational weight gain in the Norwegian Fit for Delivery trial
Abstract Objective Excessive gestational weight gain is linked to risk of preeclampsia, but it is not clear whether the association is causal. The purpose of this paper was to examine gestational weight gain in the Norwegian Fit for Delivery study among women who developed preeclampsia compared to those who did not, and to further explore associations between weight gain and preeclampsia by including data on body composition (bioimpedance) assessed in the last trimester of pregnancy. Results A total of 550 women were eligible for the study. Women who developed preeclampsia gained more weight than women who did not (difference 3.7 kg, pâ=â0.004), with a 3.5 kg difference in total body water observed in week 36 (pâ=â0.040). Adjusted for age, education, pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI), randomization, and fat mass, a one kg increase in GWG was associated with 1.3 times higher odds of preeclampsia (OR: 1.31, 95% CI 1.15â1.49, pâ<â0.001). An independent inverse association between fat mass in week 36 and odds of preeclampsia was observed (OR: 0.79, 95% CI 0.68â0.92, pâ=â0.002). Given the observed difference in total body water, these findings point to excess fluid as the component driving the association between gestational weight gain and preeclampsia in the present study. Trial registration The NFFD trial has the Clinical Trials registration: clinicaltrial.gov NCT010016