A woman who eats a high-fat diet while pregnant may be putting her unborn child at risk for developing diabetes, even if she is not obese or diabetic herself.“We found that exposure to a high-fat diet before birth modifies gene expression in the livers of offspring so they are more likely to overproduce glucose, which can cause early insulin resistance and diabetes,” says Yuan-Xiang Pan, professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois. The high-fat diet that caused the changes was a typical Western diet containing 45 percent fat.
