IF YOU'RE pregnant and you love nothing better than the taste of bacon, your day is about to get worse - especially if you're also a mouse.
Researchers have found that exposure to smells associated with fatty foods - such as bacon - during development may change how the brain responds to food and increase the risk of obesity later in life - at least in mice.
While maternal consumption of high-fat diets has long been associated with increased obesity risk in offspring, this is usually attributed to the caloric and nutritional composition.
But researchers hypothesised that volatile compounds in foods may have a role in offspring's metabolic programming.
The team from the Max Planck Institute in Germany fed pregnant mice either a bacon-flavoured diet with the same nutritional value as normal chow, or normal chow.
Maternal body weight and weight gain among fetuses was the same for both diets, but in adulthood, offspring exposed to the bacon-flavoured diet showed increased accumulation of body fat and insulin resistance, and reduced energy expenditure when fed a high-fat diet.
Analyses revealed altered activity in the brain's reward circuits and hunger neurons in these mice, similar to those seen in obese animals.
This suggests that eating foods with artificial flavours during pregnancy and breastfeeding could put babies at higher risk of obesity later on.
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