Artificially Sweetened Beverage Consumption During Pregnancy May Be Linked To Higher Infant Body Mass Index.

reports that research involving “more than 3,000 Canadian children and their mothers finds a strong link between the amount of artificially sweetened beverages the women drank during pregnancy and the body mass index of their babies.” Investigators found that “compared with women who stayed away from the drinks while they were pregnant, those who consumed them on a daily basis were twice as likely to have their babies classified as overweight when they” turned one year old. The findings were published in JAMA Pediatrics. “The diet drinkers also often were overweight themselves...and many of them did not score well on a healthy eating index.” However, “the effects on the babies still correlated with diet drinks even” after those “factors were accounted for.” However, the researchers could not find any link between consumption of high-calorie sugar-sweetened beverages during pregnancy and the risk that a baby would be overweight at age 1. After considering the effects on boys and girls separately, they found that the link was only significant in boys. Intriguingly, whether or not mothers opted for diet drinks during pregnancy had no effect on their babies’ weight at birth. To the researchers, this finding suggests that the influence – if any – of artificial sweeteners comes into play not during fetal development but after the infant is born. http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-diet-soda-pregnancy-childhood-obesity-snap-story.html Studies on whether diet drinks help keep weight off often contradict one another, with some finding that people who drink lots of diet drinks are more likely to be obese, with others finding they are better than sugary drinks.