Obesity during pregnancy causes child to have low Vitamin D
Submitted By Maria Lloyd
Photography: nhophotos.com
If your new year’s resolution is to increase your physical activity to maintain health, this may give you yet another reason to fulfill your goal: A new study reports that women who are obese at the start of their pregnancy may give birth to babies with insufficient levels of Vitamin D.
And because there are so many vitamins that we’re told are crucially important for our bodies, I researched the significance of Vitamin D. According to MedicalNewsToday.com, Vitamin D regulates your immune system, maintains healthy bones, significantly decreases your chances of acquiring cancer, and a slew of other benefits that can drastically change your life. Because Vitamin D is fat-soluble, previous studies have found that people who are obese tend to have lower levels of it in their blood.
The study, lead by Northwestern University, included 61 women who gave birth at Prentice Women’s Hospital of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. All of the women had pre-pregnancy body mass indexes that were either normal or obese. In this study, both obese and lean mothers had very similar levels of vitamin D at the end of their pregnancies, but obese women transferred less vitamin D to their babies compared to lean women. Babies born to lean mothers had a third higher amount of vitamin D.
“Nearly all of mothers in this study reported taking prenatal vitamins, which may be the reason why their own vitamin D levels were sufficient, but the babies born to the obese mothers had reduced levels of vitamin D,” says Jami L. Josefson, assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s possible that vitamin D may get sequestered in excess fat and not transferred sufficiently from an obese pregnant woman to her baby.”
If you plan to get in shape and you can’t seem to be motivated to do it for yourself, please do it for your unborn child.