Too much sugar during pregnancy bad for baby's brain: study
By Stephen Beech
Pregnant women who consume lots of sweet food and drinks can have a negative long-term impact on their unborn baby's brain, warns new research.
Japanese scientists found that moms-to-be who had a high intake of fructose - a simple sugar naturally found in fruits, honey, and vegetables - during pregnancy impaired stem cell function in the fetal brain.
Nutritional imbalance during pregnancy can have "long-lasting" effects on the health and disease susceptibility of the offspring, according to the research team.
Previous studies have shown that high fructose intake while pregnant raises the risk of gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and placental insufficiency, which can restrict fetal growth.
It also alters fetal development, predisposing children to greater risks of obesity, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, and fatty liver disease later in life.
Until now, it was not well understood how early life exposure to fructose has such long-lasting effects on the cellular and molecular level.
Researchers from Fujita Health University School of Medicine in Toyoake, Japan, found that the performance of adult rats in learning and memory tests was impaired when the rodents had been exposed to high fructose before birth by feeding their mothers with high-fructose corn syrup.
Neurogenesis - the generation of new neurons from neural stem cells (NSCs) - was also reduced in distinct regions of the brain involved in learning and cognition in the rats.
The researchers also discovered "distinct" changes in NSCs after high fructose exposure, which included reduced cell division and impaired generation of new neurons, and altered gene expression.
To explain why prenatal high-fructose exposure can have such long-lasting effects on NSCs, the research team profiled "epigenetic changes" - chemical imprints on the DNA controlling gene activity.
They found that prenatal high fructose exposure introduced "distinct" epigenetic changes in fetal NSCs which persisted into adulthood and which deregulated the activity of genes important for adult neurogenesis.
But restoring normal expression of those genes improved the function of high fructose-exposed NSCs, according to the findings published in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
Study leader Hiroya Yamada says the research illustrates how early-life exposure to an adverse environment - for instance, an imbalanced maternal nutrition - can have "long-lasting" effects on brain development and function by changing the epigenetic regulation of gene activity in NSCs.
Yamada said: "Our study suggests that neural stem cells may retain a biological memory of maternal nutrition during pregnancy.
"This may help explain how a transient prenatal dietary imbalance can lead to long-lasting changes in brain development and function."
He added that, although studies in human populations show similar correlations, further research will be required to test if human NSCs are affected by high fructose and other environmental stressors in similar ways.
The post Too much sugar during pregnancy bad for baby’s brain: study appeared first on Talker.
Copyright Talker News. All Rights Reserved.
This story was originally published July 6, 2026 at 10:21 AM.