Abstract
Periconceptual maternal nutrition has been extensively studied with a recent focus on how the modern diet influences offspring health and disease outcomes. Emerging evidence supports the idea that environmental factors during early development and programming can influence adult health and disease outcomes.
Fructose is a major component of the modern diet due to its popularity as a sweetener for foods and beverages. Furthermore, the mass consumption of ultra-processed foods containing fructose products is linked to the global rise in cardiometabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes mellitus and coronary heart disease.
There is a paucity of information regarding the effects of maternal fructose intake on the very early stages of development. Here, we investigate how fructose affects maternal physiology and, subsequently, blastocyst development and gene regulation at day five of pregnancy in Sprague-Dawley rats.
Our results indicate that excessive fructose intake affects maternal physiology and the intrauterine environment. This was associated with different blastocyst miRNA expression and post-transcriptional gene regulation which may translate into future health and disease outcomes in offspring following the period of altered development.