Fried Food Increases Gestational Diabetes Risk During Pregnancy: Study

Pregnant women who consume fried food on regular basis before conceiving are likelier to suffer from gestational diabetes, demonstrates a new research.

The study conducted at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD, part of the US National Institutes of Health) Rockville, MD, USA, showed that recently frequent consumption of fried foods has been linked to a higher risk of overweight and obesity in two Mediterranean cohorts.

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The authors included 21,079 singleton pregnancies from 15,027 women in the Nurses' Health Study II (NHS II) cohort. NHS II is an ongoing prospective cohort study of 116,671 female nurses in the USA aged 25-44 years at the start of study in 1989. The participants received a questionnaire every two years regarding disease outcomes and lifestyle behaviours, such as smoking status and medication use. Since 1991 and every four years thereafter, NHSII investigators have collected diet information, including consumption of fried foods at home and away from home, using a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ).

The authors documented 847 incident GDM pregnancies during 10 years of follow-up. After adjustment for age, parity, dietary and non-dietary factors, the risk ratios for developing GDM among women who consumed total fried foods 1-3, 4-6, and 7 or more times per week, compared with those who consumed less than once per week, were 1.13, 1.31, and 2.18 respectively (thus a more-than-doubling of risk for 7 times or more per week or more compared with less than once per week).

The authors said that the potential detrimental effects of fried food consumption on GDM risk may result from the modification of foods and frying medium and generation of harmful by-products during the frying process.

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The authors concluded that they observed that frequent fried food consumption was significantly and positively associated with the risk of incident GDM in a prospective cohort study and their study indicated potential benefits of limiting fried food consumption in the prevention of GDM in women of reproductive age.

The study is published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes).