Prenatal and postnatal maternal obesity and their associations with child nutrition and weight outcomes: A systematic review

Recently, obesity has exceeded underweight as the more prevalent form of malnutrition among school age children and adolescents globally. This development highlights the importance of understanding the causes and mechanisms through which childhood obesity manifests. Children's weight status - and dietary intake - underlie many influences, including maternal weight status. We aimed to examine how maternal overweight and obesity in a prenatal and a postnatal context influence offspring's dietary intake and their weight status in childhood and adolescence. We searched four databases for studies examining 3- to 17-year-old's dietary intake in relation to maternal weight status. A PRISMA-guided approach was followed to identify all studies eligible to contribute to our questions and 33 studies that met criteria were identified. Data were extracted and analyzed qualitatively, differencing between the temporal context of maternal overweight/obesity and several aspects of the child's dietary intake. Findings were highly heterogenous: Neither of the aspects of dietary intake showed a uniform direction with regards to maternal weight status. There was a tendency to increased adiposity rates among children exposed to postnatal maternal overweight compared to children exposed to prenatal maternal overweight, although the tendency was small. These observations are in line with recent narrative reviews that emphasize the importance of a multitude of factors, rather than the maternal BMI alone, in shaping children's dietary development.