Fatty acid intake during perinatal periods

Abstract The perinatal environment influences fetal development and the subsequent health of the offspring in adulthood. Early maternal nutrition is an important environmental programming stimulus and any “mal-nutrition” during fetal development may alter physiological functions thereby predisposing an individual to develop adult diseases (Barker et al., 1993). Animal models are used to study the effect of nutrition on metabolic programming. Diet-induced obesity models (DIO) are development in order to mimic an obesogenic environment, and the macronutrients distribution, especially fat and carbohydrates, can vary according to the aims of the model (Cardenas-Perez et al., 2018). In this context, dietary fat during development has been suggested to contribute to obesity and metabolic disorders later in life (Romani-Perez et al., 2016). Maternal overnutrition including prepregnancy, pregnancy, and lactation promotes a lipotoxic insult leading to metabolic dysfunction in offspring. Diet-induced obesity models (DIO) show that changes in hypothalamic mitochondria fusion and fission dynamics modulate metabolic dysfunction (Saben et al., 2016). Therefore, it is accepted that early exposure to excess fat, especially during fetal and early postnatal period, may have negative effects on the later metabolic health of the offspring. However, the deleterious effects of intake of a diet rich in fat depend not only on the total amount of fat but the type of fat that is ingested (Llopis et al., 2014). In this context, long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) play an important role in the fetal and postnatal development and health of the offspring. Summarizing, environmental factors such as inadequate maternal nutrition during pregnancy and lactation can alter gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms and therefore affect the structure and function of tissues or organs of the offspring permanently by increasing the susceptibility to develop chronic diseases such as obesity.