Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinegel. I'm afraid

there's more bad news for manufacturers and defenders of artificial sweeteners. A study

published this fall in the International Journal of Obesity reports that the consumption

of diet soda or the use of non-caloric sweeteners, neutral sweet, or equal during pregnancy,

is associated with a higher body mass index, or BMI, and more fat mass in those children.

And they are able to observe that from babyhood all the way through early adulthood. And

the use of zero calorie sweeteners during pregnancy is not at all uncommon about a third

of pregnant women report using them on any given day. This latest study followed about

1700 women from Massachusetts. About 70% of them were white, and the average BMI for

the women before their pregnancies was 24.6. That's just shy of what would be considered

overweight, but considered to be in the normal weight category. And they asked these women

to indicate how often they used artificial sweeteners or drank diet soda during the first

two trimesters of their pregnancies. And then they followed those children who were born

to those women from birth to the age of 18, recording their BMI and their body fat at

several different points throughout their life. So then the researchers adjusted all of

this data to account for a whole slew of things that could potentially skew those findings,

including things like the mother's pre-pregnancy, BMI, her age, her race or ethnicity, the educational

level, whether or not she'd had previous pregnancies, her physical activity levels and habits,

whether she smokes, even the dad's BMI and level of education. And after taking all of

that into account, they still found that the kids born to the moms who consumed artificial

sweeteners one or more times a day during their pregnancies had higher BMI's and higher fat

mass compared to kids whose moms consumed little to no artificial sweeteners. And the difference

...