Research
Hormonal
Maternal consumption of a high-fat diet during gestation and lactation causes hypothalamic inflammation and altered neural projections in offspring, predisposing them to obesity and metabolic disorders.
For expectant mothers, avoiding high-fat diets during pregnancy and breastfeeding may help prevent metabolic programming issues in the child, such as altered brain circuits that regulate hunger.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Strikingly, a maternal diet rich in saturated fatty acids during gestation and lactation leads to hypothalamic inflammation in rodent offspring... maternal high-fat feeding during lactation in mice severely alters the projections of POMC and AgRP neurons to second-order neurons, resulting in increased obesity and impaired glucose homeostasis in the offspring.
Why this rating
Consistent findings in rodent and non-human primate models; human data is observational.
Source
Hypothalamic circuits regulating appetite and energy homeostasis: pathways to obesity
Katharina Timper et al. · Disease Models & Mechanisms · 2017
DOI 10.1242/dmm.026609
narrative_reviewCited 770×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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