Maternal obesity legacy: exercise it away!

Recent decades have seen maternal obesity during pregnancy increase at an alarming rate. Maternal obesity or extreme weight gain during pregnancy leads to an adverse intrauterine environment that impacts embryonic programming and the offspring’s susceptibility to developing chronic metabolic diseases later in life. Regular exercise training is an effective way of postponing or preventing obesity and type 2 diabetes. Maternal exercise training before and during pregnancy has beneficial effects on maternal health and the health of the offspring. Exercise training intervention in obese pregnant mothers attenuates the negative metabolic outcomes in the offspring. But whether exercise training of offspring from obese mothers even later in adult life can counteract these effects is unknown. In this issue of Diabetologia , Bucci and colleagues (DOI: 10.1007/s00125-015-3780-8 ) report that resistance exercise training in elderly women born to obese mothers can improve their metabolic status, overcoming the deleterious impact of maternal obesity. These results underscore that, irrespective of parental legacy, it is never too late to begin an exercise programme and improve your metabolic health.