A healthy diet geared toward promoting a healthy inflammatory response reduces a woman’s risk of developing gestational diabetes, a new study from the University of Turku in Finland concluded.
 
Gestational diabetes occurs in pregnant women when their blood sugar levels get too high, and is most likely to affect those who are overweight or obese. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), gestational diabetes occurs in 2-10% of all pregnancies, and can lead to a multitude of health complications for babies.
 
The mother-child study, involving 351 pregnant women, relied upon calculating each woman’s nutrient intake from food diaries. This was done via a three-day food diet which required the participants to track their eating on two week days and one weekend day.
 
Researchers then indexed the women based on their diets into two broad categories – either healthy or unhealthy based on a standard diet quality index and a dietary inflammatory index, the latter of which predicted the inflammatory potential of a woman’s diet. They then diagnosed women with gestational diabetes with an oral glucose tolerance test between 24 and 28 gestational weeks – in total, 23% of the pregnant women in the study were diagnosed with diabetes.
 
The authors of the study found that those with a higher score on the energy-adjusted dietary inflammatory index (E-DII), indicating an unhealthy pro-inflammatory diet, experienced a 27% higher risk of developing gestational diabetes. Further, they noted that in women who developed gestational diabetes consumed higher amounts of total fat, saturated fatty acids, and trans fatty acids, and lower amounts of dietary fiber compared to women who didn’t develop gestational diabetes.
 
High amounts of vegetables, fruits, berries, and whole grain products, along with mostly having unsaturated fats, was particularly important when it came to gestational diabetes risk in the study cohort, Kirsi Laitinen, associate professor and primary investigator of the study, noted.
 
“Taken together, the results suggest that pregnant women with overweight or obesity consuming an overall healthy diet and one with a low inflammatory potential experience a lower risk of developing GDM compared to their counterparts who consume a more pro-inflammatory, less healthy diet,” the authors concluded. “It was also demonstrated that avoiding an excess intake of dietary fats, especially saturated fatty acids, and other nutrients promoting inflammation in the body, might be associated with a decreased risk of developing GDM. It is likely that considering these aspects in dietary counseling would benefit these women.”