Pregnant women can safely limit their weight gain with diet and exercise interventions, the results of a group of trials by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) show. Many overweight and obese women gain too much weight during pregnancy, further ratcheting up the already increased risk of serious complications for themselves and their babies such as childhood obesity or diabetes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an important study because it affirms that women can change behaviours to control the amount of weight gained in pregnancy,\u201d said lead author Alan Peaceman from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, US. However, the reduced weight gain\u2014 about four pounds per woman \u2014 did not result in fewer obstetrical complications, including caesarean sections, diabetes, hypertension, and preeclampsia, or change the average birth weight of the baby.<\/p>\n
It could be because \u201cby the time these women are already in the second trimester, it may already be late to change important outcomes\u201d, Peaceman said. \u201cTo lower the risk of obstetrical complications, they may have to start changing their lifestyle before or immediately after they conceive,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n
Each trial offered a varied lifestyle intervention but all aimed to improve diet quality and reduce calories, increase physical activity and incorporate behaviour strategies such as self-monitoring. Overweight and obese women are a critical group to target because they have higher rates of excess pregnancy weight gain and of retaining that weight postpartum. They are also more likely to have children who are obese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pregnant women can safely limit their weight gain with diet and exercise interventions, the results of a group of trials by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) show. Many overweight and obese women gain too much weight during pregnancy, further ratcheting up the already increased risk of serious complications for themselves and their babies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41683,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41684,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41682\/revisions\/41684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}