Trans fat-eating mom can make a fat baby!

Were you a pleasingly plump baby? If so, you might have a case against your mother -- if she was ingesting trans fat by the gallon while breastfeeding. Alex Anderson, assistant professor at the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and his team studied 96 women and their babies...

By weege

October 11, 2010

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Were you a pleasingly plump baby? If so, you might have a case against your mother -- if she was ingesting trans fat by the gallon while breastfeeding.

Alex Anderson, assistant professor at the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and his team studied 96 women and their babies and came up with this not-exactly astonishing discovery: eating trans fat will not only make you fat, but your baby, too.

Mothers who ingested more than 4.5 grams of trans fat per day while breast-feeding had newborns with a higher amount of body fat than mothers who kept their fact consumption down. The infants of these women had nearly a six times a greater risk of excessive fat accumulation.

"It would help to be able to follow the child from when the mother was pregnant, through birth, and then adolescence, so that we can confirm what the type of infant feeding and maternal diet during breast-feeding have to do with the recent epidemic of childhood obesity," said Anderson in a college news release about the study.

Listen up, ladies: All those calories don't just go to your hips.

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