The weight in pregnancy is one of the headaches of every pregnant woman, in large part, because of the excessive persecution carried out by some health professionals. The issue becomes so important at times, that there are mothers who become obsessed in such a way that they practically go on a diet while pregnant.
This is a mistake because pregnant women should eat a balanced diet that meets their caloric needs (same as non-pregnant women).
To confirm this, a study conducted with primates has recently been presented (it is not ethical to conduct studies of this type with pregnant women) that shows Eating less at the beginning of pregnancy can affect the brain development of babies.
The study has been carried out at the University of Texas, in San Antonio (USA) and has been published in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences". In it, researchers have discovered that there is a lower formation of connections between cells, cell divisions and a smaller amount of growth factors in the fetuses of those mothers who are fed a reduced diet in the first half of pregnancy.
These results can be extrapolated to human women because the phases of primate brain development are very similar to those of human fetuses.
Two groups of baboon mothers have been compared for the study. The moms of one of them ate what they wanted during the first half of pregnancy, while those of the other group ate 30% less, a reduction very similar to what many pregnant moms do in the United States.
As the study authors comment:
This is a critical time window in which many neurons are born in addition to brain support cells. We discovered deregulation of hundreds of genes, indicating that nutrition plays an important role during fetal development by regulating basic cellular machinery.
The study confirms once again something that is more than obvious: we need a balanced and sufficient diet for our body to function properly with special attention at the time of pregnancy, when an insufficient diet can cause, in the absence of food, accumulated fat of the mother, of less nutritional quality and with some toxins that are released in said process should be consumed.
