Study: Exercising during pregnancy benefits babies who breastfeed

 

Even moderate exercise during pregnancy increases a compound in breast milk that reduces a baby’s lifelong risks of serious health issues such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

 

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and The Ohio State University College of Medicine published the findings of their study in the journal Nature Metabolism. 

 

“We've done studies in the past that have shown that maternal exercise improves the health of offspring, but in this study, we wanted to begin to answer the question of why,” said Kristin Stanford, a researcher at The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center’s Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center and lead author of the study. “Because there is evidence that breast milk plays a major role, we wanted to isolate the effects of breast milk on offspring health.”

 

Stanford and her team  worked with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, Arkansas Children’s Nutrition Center, and the Joslin Diabetes Center. They studied mice born from sedentary mothers and fed them milk from mothers who were active throughout pregnancy. They found that the health benefits from fit moms transferred to the pups, proving that they were, in fact, passed through breast milk and not simply inherited genetic traits.

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