Gaining too much weight during pregnancy is
associated with an increased risk that your child will be obese as a
preschooler, new evidence shows. Gaining too little weight may have the
same effect.
Institute of Medicine guidelines for pregnancy weight gain
range from 25 to 40 pounds for normal-weight or underweight women, 15
to 25 pounds for overweight women and 11 to 20 pounds for obese women.
Researchers followed 4,145 women from before they became pregnant until their children were 2 to 5 years old. The study appears online in The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Over all, compared with children of mothers
who met the guidelines, children of mothers who gained too much had a 46
percent increased risk of being overweight or obese. The researchers
adjusted for mothers’ age, race, diet, education, B.M.I. before becoming
pregnant, and other characteristics.
The effect was even more marked for women
who were not overweight: in that group, gaining more than the guidelines
indicate increased the risk of having an obese child by 79 percent, and
gaining less than the recommended amount increased it by 63 percent.
“Currently, more than half of women gain too
much during pregnancy,” said the senior author, Monique M. Hedderson, a
research scientist at Kaiser Permanente Northern California. “Only 10
percent of women are gaining too little. We definitely don’t want the
headline to be ‘pregnant women need to gain more weight.’”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 18, 2014
An
earlier version of this article included a range of recommended weight
gain for normal-weight and underweight expectant women that was based on
incorrect information on the Institute of Medicine's website. The range
is 25 to 40 pounds, not 28 to 40.
Source: http://goo.gl/WDI0jP
