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Fatty foods in pregnant women's diets trigger breast cancer in their daughters
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Fatty foods present in the diet of pregnant women can increase the risk of developing breast cancer not only in the expectant mother, but also in her offspring - daughters, granddaughters and their children.
A scientific article by scientists from Georgetown University in Washington was published in the journal Nature Communications.
"We know that a mother's diet affects the health of her children. But our research has shown for the first time how big this influence is. High levels of estrogen in the body, as well as the consumption of fatty foods, clearly affected the health of the test rats. We studied this connection and the hereditary factor in the development of cancer," says co-author Lena Hilakivi-Clark.
Specialists were interested in "family" causes of breast cancer. According to experts, approximately 15% of women suffering from breast cancer had several relatives with a similar oncological disease. It was this circumstance that prompted scientists to take up the study of this problem.
Researchers have found a link between high-calorie food and the risk of breast cancer. To find out whether such a diet has an effect on offspring, experts conducted experiments on rats.
The female animals were divided into three groups. The first group ate normal food, the second group's diet consisted of products saturated with fats. The rats "sat" on such a diet after conception and throughout pregnancy. The third group ate fatty food with estrogen supplements only in the last weeks of pregnancy.
As a result of summing up the results, it turned out that high-calorie food had an extremely negative effect on the offspring of the experimental rats - the number of tumors in the offspring of such animals was 55-60% higher than in the control group. A similar situation arose with the health of those whose mothers ate fatty foods with added estrogen in the last stages of pregnancy.
Experts say that this negative effect persisted in the next two generations of rodents, and whether the male or female line inherited it did not matter.
According to the researchers, the cause of this heredity was changes that occurred in the protein structure of DNA molecules in the cells of the embryo.
Changes of this kind can persist for several generations and pose a risk of developing breast cancer.
“This problem is very relevant in the context of modern times, when society is literally saturated with fatty foods, which often contain large doses of estrogen,” say the authors of the work.
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