About seven times as many children and adolescents have obesity today compared with 50 years ago. The period in the mother’s womb and until a child is 2 years old (known as the first 1000 days of life) is the most critical period for disorders leading to obesity in childhood and later in life. In the Sugar Mama project, we will determine the effects of exercise before, during, and after pregnancy on sugar molecules called human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) in the blood and in breastmilk. These sugar molecules can explain some of the beneficial effects of breastfeeding on infant health, mediated by their impact on the infants’ gut bacteria. The gut bacteria and the metabolites they produce are emerging as important players in obesity.

Since there is scarce prior research on whether and how exercise impacts HMOs and whether such modifications affect infant obesity risk, the results of Sugar Mama will be highly novel. In this interdisciplinary project, we will use advanced methods (nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry (MS)) to determine the concentrations of selected HMOs and other metabolites that are relevant for the health of both the mother and the child. The biological samples that have been obtained in the projects 'Before the Beginning' and 'ExMilk' will be analysed at NTNU’s core facilities at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Faculty of Natural Sciences.

Our overall hypothesis is that maternal exercise will induce beneficial changes in HMO concentrations in pregnancy and during lactation, impacting the infants’ obesity risk via modifications in gut bacteria and their metabolites. If our hypotheses are confirmed, our results will signal a paradigm shift in interdisciplinary research on nutritional programming to prevent further increases in the prevalence of childhood obesity.

PhD-student: Rohmah Nur Fathimah
Postdoc: Eva Madland