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Fried food consumption before pregnancy increased gestational diabetes risk
Eating fried food regularly, particularly when prepared away from home, increased the likelihood women would develop gestational diabetes, according to research published in Diabetologia.
Women in their reproductive years could help prevent the pregnancy-related complication by limiting how frequently they consume fried foods, the researchers suggest.
“We observed that frequent fried food consumption was significantly and positively associated with the risk of incident gestational diabetes in a prospective cohort study,” the researchers wrote. “Our study indicates potential benefits of limiting fried food consumption in the prevention of gestational diabetes in women of reproductive age. Further studies are warranted to confirm our findings and to discover the underlying mechanisms.”
Wei Bao, MD, PhD, of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, and colleagues from other institutions prospectively analyzed 21,079 singleton pregnancies among 15,027 women from the ongoing Nurses’ Health Study II cohort, which recruited women aged 25 to 44 years at the start of study in 1989.
Wei Bao
The researchers collected data on diet, including consumption of fried foods at home and away from home, using a validated food frequency questionnaire, at 4-year intervals starting in 1991. Generalized estimating equations with log-binomial models were used to estimate RR. Adjustments were made for age, parity, dietary and nondietary factors.
During 10 years of follow-up, 847 incident gestational diabetes pregnancies were documented. The risk for gestational diabetes was greater among women who consumed fried foods 7 or more times per week (RR=2.18; 95% CI, 1.53-3.09), four to six times per week (RR=1.31; 95% CI, 1.08-1.59) and one to three times per week (RR=1.13; 95% CI, 0.97-1.32) vs. less than once per week, considering adjustments. The association remained after further adjusting for BMI (P for trend=.01).
“The potential detrimental effects of fried food consumption on gestational diabetes risk may result from the modification of foods and frying medium and generation of harmful by-products during the frying process,” the researchers wrote. “Frying also results in significantly higher levels of dietary advanced glycation end products, the derivatives of glucose-protein or glucose-lipid interactions … implicated in insulin resistance, pancreatic beta-cell damage and diabetes, partly because they promote oxidative stress and inflammation.”
In a separate analysis, the researchers observed a significant association between gestational diabetes and fried food consumption away from home, but not at home.
“Deterioration of oils during frying is more profound when the oils are reused, a practice more common away from home than at home,” the researchers wrote. “This may partly explain why we observed a stronger association of gestational diabetes risk with fried foods consumed away from home than fried foods consumed at home.”
Disclosure: This study was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH. The Nurses’ Health Study II was funded by NIH grants. One researcher received a mentored fellowship from the American Diabetes Association.