Well, Nowadays youngsters keep telling that they have diabetes and they are not able to eat their favourite foods often. What is the reason behind? One of the reason behind is "Gestational diabetes" during the pregnancy.
What is gestational diabetes?:
Women who never had diabetes before but who have high blood glucose(sugar) levels during pregnancy are said to have gestational diabetes.
How gestational diabetes starts?:
Hormones from the placenta help the baby develop. These hormones also block the action of the mother's insulin in her body. This problem is called insulin resistance. Insulin resistance makes it hard for the mother's body to use insulin. She may need up to three times as much insulin during pregnancy. Gestational diabetes starts when your body is not able to make and use all the insulin it needs for pregnancy. Without enough insulin, glucose cannot leave the blood and be changed to energy. Glucose builds up in the blood to high levels. This caused to start gestational diabetes.
How gestational diabetes affects the baby?
Untreated or poorly controlled gestational diabetes affects baby in the womb. When you have gestational diabetes, pancreas works overtime to produce insulin, but the insulin does not lower your glucose levels. Although insulin does not cross placenta where glucose and other nutrients do. So extra glucose goes through the placenta giving the baby high sugar levels. This causes the baby's pancreas to make extra insulin to get rid of the blood glucose. Since the baby getting more energy than it needs to grow and develop, the extra energy stored as fat.
This can lead to fat baby. This causes the shoulder problem for the baby during birth. Because of the extra insulin made by the baby's pancreas, newborns may have low blood glucose levels at birth and have higher risk for breathing problems. Babies with excess insulin become risk for obesity and adults who are at risk for type 2 diabetes.
What about fact about potato?
NIH/Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development researchers did received surprising information from their study. As per the study women who eat more potatoes during pregnancy will have higher rate of gestational diabetes risk.
Researchers from NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and Harvard University evaluated more than 15,000 women in the Nurses' Health Study II . They analyzed record from 1991 to 2001 of women who had no history of illness before pregnancy and not had gestational diabetes before. Every four year the women filled out a questionnaire on the kinds of food they had eaten for the previous year. For potatoes, the women were asked if they had consumed baked, boiled, mashed potatoes, fries or chips with possible options from “never†to “six or more times a dayâ€.
The researchers found that women who ate more potatoes had a higher risk of gestational diabetes. They estimated reductions in gestational diabetes risk by substituting the following foods for two servings of potatoes per week:
- 9 percent for other vegetables
- 10 percent for legumes
- 12 percent for whole grain foods
However, the results do not prove conclusively and these results needs to be confirmed by other studies. We will wait for end results.
