Effect of high-fat diet during gestation, lactation, or postweaning on physiological and behavioral indexes in borderline hypertensive rats

Abstract

Mitra A, Alvers KM, Crump EM, Rowland NE. Effect of high-fat diet during gestation, lactation, or postweaning on physiological and behavioral indexes in borderline hypertensive rats. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 296: R20 -R28, 2009. First published October 29, 2008 doi:10.1152/ajpregu.90553.2008.-Maternal obesity is becoming more prevalent. We used borderline hypertensive rats (BHR) to investigate whether a high-fat diet at different stages of development has adverse programming consequences on metabolic parameters and blood pressure. Wistar dams were fed a high-or low-fat diet for 6 wk before mating with spontaneously hypertensive males and during the ensuing pregnancy. At birth, litters were fostered to a dam from the same diet group as during gestation or to the alternate diet condition. Female offspring were weaned on either control or "junk food" diets until about 6 mo of age. Rats fed the high-fat junk food diet were hyperphagic relative to their chow-fed controls. The junk food-fed rats were significantly heavier and had greater fat pad mass than those rats maintained on chow alone. Importantly, those rats suckled by high-fat dams had heavier fat pads than those suckled by control diet dams. Fasting serum leptin and insulin levels differed as a function of the gestational, lactational, and postweaning diet histories. Rats gestated in, or suckled by high-fat dams, or maintained on the junk food diet were hyperleptinemic compared with their respective controls. Indirect blood pressure did not differ as a function of postweaning diet, but rats gestated in the high-fat dams had lower mean arterial blood pressures than those gestated in the control diet dams. The postweaning dietary history affected food-motivated behavior; junk food-fed rats earned less food pellets on fixed (FR) and progressive (PR) ratio cost schedules than chow-fed controls. In conclusion, the effects of maternal high-fat diet during gestation or lactation were mostly small and transient. The postweaning effects of junk food diet were evident on the majority of the parameters measured, including body weight, fat pad mass, serum leptin and insulin levels, and operant performance. developmental programming; blood pressure; metabolic syndrome; motivation and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) found that Ͼ50% of nonpregnant women of child-bearing age (20 -39 yr of age) in the United States of America were overweight or obese (body mass index Ͼ25 kg/m 2 ), and Ͼ30% of girls between the ages of 12-19 were either at risk of being overweight or were overweight (22). These statistics imply that almost half of all babies are born to mothers who are either overweight or obese during pregnancy, and this fraction is likely to increase in the future.Adverse effects of obesity on mothers have been wellstudied; these include gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, prolonged delivery, and delayed wound healing postdelivery, all of which significantly increase health care costs (18). Babies born to obese women have a higher incidence of cong...

Leptin resistance: a prediposing factor for diet-induced obesity

“…Feeding an HF or combination of HF, sugar, and salt (Western diet) during pregnancy was reported to subject offspring to development of later obesity (5,38). Although leptin resistance was not examined in these studies, consumption of the HF diet during gestation, lactation, or postweaning resulted in hyperleptinemia, indicative of a presumed leptin-resistant state.…”

Developmental Programming: Priming Disease Susceptibility for Subsequent Generations

“…Such augmented sensitivity could be due to changes in insulin production [48], perturbation to central appetite control [43, 47, 49, 50], altered circadian regulation of liver metabolism [51], or changes in the microbiome [52]. The effects of postnatal diet among offspring exposed to prenatal Western-style diet, compared to offspring of control-fed dams, varied within study by gender [42, 45, 46]. In other studies, the effects of postnatal overnutrition were similar across prenatal diet groups [53, 54] or, for body weight outcomes, even weaker [55, 56].…”

High-Fat Diet Causes Subfertility and Compromised Ovarian Function Independent of Obesity in Mice

“…Whenever a pregnancy occurred, the number of pups in a litter was recorded. Differences between groups in pregnancy rate were modeled over time using a logit link function within a general linear mixed effects model [20], thereby estimating a logistic mixed effects model [16]. Differences in number of pups per litter were modeled across time using a negative binomial link function within a general linear mixed effects model.…”

“…D12450Bi; Research Diets, New Brunswick, NJ), and 36 mice were placed on HFD with 60% of calories coming from fat (catalog D12492i, Research Diets) for the duration of the study. Both diets have been formulated specifically for scientific research and have been used widely in research with rodents [14][15][16]. Dietary components of the diets used in this study can be found in Supplemental Table S1 (Supplemental Data are available online at www.biolreprod.org).…”