New Study in The FASEB Journal: A Healthful Diet Could Help Infants Fight Off Effects of Maternal Obesity

Friday, July 11, 2025

Maternal obesity doesn’t just affect the health of a pregnant woman. It can also have effects on her child, increasing their risk of developing obesity and its associated complications. According to a recent study published in The FASEB Journal, an early-in-life dietary intervention in mice can potentially reverse one of those complications—a reduction in the number of innate immune cells in the gut. The findings suggest that a healthful diet in infancy could help children of obese mothers start off on the right foot. 

Obesity rates among children are on the rise. In the 1970s, only 5% of children were considered to have the condition, but by 2020, that rate more than tripled to nearly 19%. Studies have shown that children of obese mothers have an increased risk of developing the condition themselves. “We are observing obesity affecting the same families across different generations,” says Ta-Chiang Liu of Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study. “How it affects our immune system is critical in how we design intervention strategies.”

To get a better understanding of how being overweight and its effects could pass down through the generations, many researchers have turned to animal models. In previous work, Liu and colleagues showed that mice fed a Western diet had fewer Paneth and intraepithelial lymphocyte cells, which are involved in the immune response, in the gut compared to controls. 

In the current study, the team wanted to find out how the mouse maternal diet impacts the health of offspring and whether negative effects could be reversed with a nutritional intervention. Female mice were fed either a standard (SD) or high-fat, high-sugar Western diet (WD) before breeding, and their offspring were divided into two groups and fed either an SD or WD diet. 

Paneth cells in SD-fed offspring were more numerous and less defective than WD-fed offspring, even if their mothers had consumed a Western diet. This result suggests that Paneth cell effects could be reversed in the offspring by eating more nutritious foods than their mothers. However, SD consumption could not restore intraepithelial lymphocyte cell numbers in offspring of WD-fed mothers.

“Our work suggests that active design of a healthier diet in children who are otherwise prone to develop diet-induced obesity due to family dietary habits may have a positive impact on the long-term immunity balance,” says Liu.

Funding: National Institutes of Health

Read the full article, “Transgenerational obesity modulation of gut mucosal immunity,” published in The FASEB Journal.