A study conducted on rats by researchers from Rockefeller University, New York revealed that pregnant mothers should refrain from eating high fat diets, as it causes permanent changes in fetal brains, resulting in overeating and obesity early in life.

Over the past three decades, childhood obesity has risen in USA. These findings are useful in explaining the rise and in helping us understand the mechanisms of fetal programming, while shedding light on new brain cell production.

In a university news release, Sarah F. Leibowitz, Director - Laboratory of Behavioral Neurobiology at Rockefeller and the study's senior author states: "We've shown that short-term exposure to a high-fat diet in utero produces permanent neurons in the fetal brain that later increase the appetite for fat. This work provides the first evidence for a fetal programme that links high levels of fat circulating in the mother's blood during pregnancy to the overeating and increased weight gain of offspring after weaning."

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, was conducted on pregnant rats fed with either a high-fat or a balanced diet for two weeks. It showed, babies born to high fat diet mothers, tended to weigh more during their entire lifetime and began puberty earlier, than those whose mothers ate a balanced diet. The former also had higher levels of triglycerides in the blood at birth and as adults, including a greater production of brain peptides that stimulate eating and weight gain.

According to Leibowitx, the creation of neurons that increase the appetite for fat could also occur in human babies, whose mothers ate a high-fat diet during pregnancy, causing her believe that we are programming our children to be fat. Scientists have also shown obese and diabetic mothers produce heavier children and exposure to fat-rich foods in early childhood results in obesity in adulthood.

So, while we know, food intake and body weight is programmed during fetal development, yet we need to find out more about the mechanism underlying this programming.