Pre-Pregnancy Diet Ups Gestational Diabetes Risk

Published: Oct 9, 2014

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

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Loading up on fried foods in the years leading up to pregnancy may put women at an increased risk of developing gestational diabetes, researchers found.

In a prospective cohort study, women who ate fried foods at least seven times per week before getting pregnant were more than twice as likely to develop the condition as those who did so less than once per week, Cuilin Zhang, MD, PhD, MPH, of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and colleagues reported in Diabetologia.

The study supports the "potential benefit of limiting fried food consumption in the prevention of gestational diabetes in women of reproductive age," they wrote.

Zhang and colleagues assessed 21,079 singleton pregnancies from 15,027 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study II, which has collected dietary information every 4 years since 1991. There were 847 cases of gestational diabetes during 10 years of follow-up.

They found that women who ate fried food seven times per week or more in the years leading up to their pregnancies were more than twice as likely to develop gestational diabetes than those who ate it less than once a week (RR 2.18, 95% CI 1.53 to 3.09).

There was also a 31% increased risk of developing the condition for women who ate fried foods four to six times per week, they found (95% CI 1.08 to 1.59).

The association for women with the greatest intake remained significant after controlling for body mass index (BMI) (RR 1.88, 95% CI 1.34 to 2.64), and it was attenuated but also still remained significant after controlling for intake of red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages (RR 1.78, 95% CI 1.27 to 2.51).

Fried food eaten away from home also appeared to have a stronger association with gestational diabetes than fried food cooked at home, the researchers said. This may have something to do with the fact that deterioration of oils (via oxygenation and hydrogenation) is worse when the oils are reused -- which is more commonly done at restaurants and fast-food places.