A mother’s diet can have health impacts not only on her immediate offspring, but also on the next generation, a mouse study suggests. Compared with controls, the offspring of mice fed a high-fat diet suffered both an altered gut microbiome and deficits in social interactions. In turn, their offspring too showed social dysfunction, as well as slight abnormalities in microbiome composition. The findings were published in Cell Reports on October 11.
“The current study lends to the growing body of evidence that . . . a maternal high fat or Western style feeding during pregnancy and lactation modifies their offspring’s microbiome in both early life and later in childhood,” Kjersti Aagaard, an expert in maternal-fetal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine who was not involved in this study, writes in an email to The Scientist.
Notably, she adds, “this altered microbiome and associated abnormal neurobehavior is not only evident in ...
