[acb-hsp] Your Mom Is Why You're Fat

[peter altschul]

Your Mom Is Why You're Fat
  BY Morgan Clendaniel Wed Apr 20, 2011
  Obesity is at an epidemic stage in America.  It's slowly 
killing a huge number of people and it's costing tons of money.  
Consider this, an obese patient costs $443 more dollars per 
inpatient visit than a person at a healthy weight.  In total, 
that costs the country billions a year.  Many people and programs 
have considered different ways to lower the obesity rate, from 
championing exercise to surgical procedures.  It turns out, it's 
not the obese we need to target, it's their moms.
  What should expectant mothers avoid? The same thing everyone 
should avoid: A diet high in carbohydrate (such as sugars) and 
high saturated fat.  What makes the goose fat also makes the 
gander fat.
  The study, which will appear in Diabetes, found that a mother's 
diet while pregnant can alter her child's DNA--called epigenetic 
change--to make the child more susceptible to obesity.  It 
doesn't matter whether the mother herself is skinny or fat, 
simply what she eats during the early stages of pregnancy  It 
means that we could perhaps spend money and effort more wisely by 
making sure pregnant women don't create obese-prone babies to 
start with.  Surely, there are other causes for obesity, and 
mothers who eat badly during pregnancy might simply feed their 
kids crap to begin with.  But anything that can alter a baby's 
DNA should probably be avoided if you're pregnant--and might be 
something you want to avoid in your daily life whether you're 
expecting or not.
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