High-fat foods can affect embryo development in mice study
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comMother's diet, genes may raise birth defect risk
Seeded on Tue Jul 6, 2010 10:24 AM EDT (msnbc.com)
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I am offended by this. I have a son born with a Congenital Heart Defect. I am not fat and watch my low fat diet. I do not have any known genetic heart issues. More research needs to be done and not pointed at the Mom's for this. We have enough to worry and guilt about our kids. I think I can speak for alot of other Moms with kids with Heart Defects. There are alot of environmental factors people cannot control around them especially if issues are kept quiet.
There is no reason to be offended by truth. Yes, there are many factors that could influence birth defects...and, in mice at least, a high fat diet may be one of them. What's so wrong with someone conducting a study and finding an increased incidence of issues when mothers ate a high fat diet?
If you aren't one of the overweight, high fat diet mothers then good for you. That doesn't mean other mothers didn't contribute to their children being born with a defect.
As a parent of a child born with a heart defect, I can totally relate to Gayle's initial reaction. As many parents of children born with heart defects have done, I spent a lot of time wondering if there was something I could have done to prevent it.
The internal dialogue can be torturous at times. "Did I eat the wrong things? I was SO careful about my diet; I didn't even eat chocolate because it had caffeine in it....so why did this happen...etc." so my initial response when I saw the headline was "Wonderful, so it was all MY fault."
That said, if you take a step back and mute the torturous internal dialogue, you see this study may help researchers eventually find out how to prevent heart defects in the future. I don't think the intent is to blame the parents at all. The intent is to solve a medical mystery so other parents and children may not have to deal with a preventable defect in the future. How great would that be?
I do wish this article had provided more information about the kinds of fat provided to the mice in the study, what is considered a high-fat diet, etc.
Gayle--you obviously are missing the "logic" and "cause and effect" gene. Neither the article nor the research state that EVERY baby with congenital heart defects MUST have had a mother who was fat/ate a poor diet.
They're saying these two factors could RAISE THE RISK.
I can't help but wonder what exactly was in this "high fat diet".
Was it nutritionally identical to the "balanced" diet except for the addition of high quality fats, or was it the equivalent of a diet of fast food, nutritionally bankrupt and full of refined sugars and manufactured plastic fats?
If the latter, it could well be factors other than the fats to blame. If the former, then this would be news indeed.
Now let's do a similar study with high sugar.
A high sugar diet is pure poison.
Fat should enhance your brain cells; added sugar does nothing useful as part of an ordinary diet.
I don't care how much they try to target exactly what they want to measure, people often don't tell truth's about their diets in these studies. Also, I cannot imagine how they design them to keep all other variables out. What about insecticides or the weather or anything. How they linked fat to this study is highly suspicious.