High Fat Diet BEFORE Pregnancy INCREASES Risk of Gestational Diabetes

A recent study [u1] from the National Institute of Health found lowering dietary fat intake can reduce a woman’s risk of developing gestational diabetes. They were tracking the diet and lifestyle habits of 13,000 women that were between 22 and 45 years of age and enrolled in the US Nurses’ Health Study II. They found about 6% of women developed gestational diabetes. However upon analysis they found that women eating more foods that were high in animal fats had double the risk of developing this problem compared to women on a low fat diet. When they performed a more detailed nutritional analysis, they found that dietary cholesterol and animal fats were the only foods consistently associated with an increased risk of gestational diabetes. So carbohydrates (sugars) did not create any measurable impact. Exercise was found to reduce the risk of diabetes but not enough to offset the effects of a high fat diet. They concluded that reducing the consumption of animal fat by as little as 5% while trying to become pregnant –even if replacing it with plant derived fats—measurably reduces a woman’s risk of diabetes during pregnancy.