A new study suggests obesity could be prevented by taking supplements before pregnancy

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Researchers say it’s possible pre-pregnancy obesity could be prevented with dietary supplements and that it should be treated as a neurodevelopmental disorder, according to a new study.

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There are two billion people around the world who are overweight — and obesity affects 650 million of those people, the World Health Organization reported in 2016. With this study, researchers hoped to find ways to stop what they call denoted worldwide epidemic. The study published in the journal scientific advanceswas conducted by researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas along with other institutions.

“The undeniable observation of the past several decades is that obesity treatment is not working very well,” said author Dr. Robert Waterland of the National Post. He is Professor of Pediatric Nutrition and a Fellow of the USDA Children’s Nutrition Research Center in Baylor.

“We clearly need a different approach,” he said.

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The new approach in light of the study is to treat obesity as a neurodevelopmental disorder – some of which have been successfully prevented with dietary supplements. For example, neural tube defects that occur in human fetuses have been prevented by increasing dietary folic acid.

“The data show very clearly that fortifying the diet with folic acid was very effective in preventing this devastating developmental consequence of neural tube defects that include things like spina bifida,” said Waterland.

“We need to take a similar approach to obesity, since the body weight regulation mechanism of each individual is largely based in the brain.”

The study, conducted in mice, focused on a region of the brain that regulates food intake, physical activity and metabolism, the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, explained the study’s first author, Dr. Harry MacKay. The researchers studied epigenetics – “a system of molecular bookmarks that determines which genes are used or not in different cell types”.

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The arcuate nucleus undergoes epigenetic changes in fetus and early childhood that may later affect programming of body weight regulation. Changes in this part of the brain could lead to significant weight gain later in life, although “exactly how this works remains unknown,” Waterland said.

Another factor that plays a role is maternal obesity.

“We already know that maternal obesity during pregnancy promotes obesity in her offspring,” Waterland said. “It’s likely that maternal obesity could disrupt this epigenetic development, and we could see how this could result in her child being somewhat ill-equipped to properly regulate food intake and energy expenditure.”

In a previous study, also done in mice, Waterland said that dietary supplements “prevent the transgenerational amplification of obesity” — which could be a solution for the future.

The reason this study is interesting is because “we were able to show a direct link to human genetics,” Waterland said.

As obesity remains a major public health challenge, the study concludes, we hope that our work will revitalize efforts to understand the developmental determinants of obesity risk.