New research suggests that a mother's diet during pregnancy may affect her offspring's alcohol and nicotine use later in life.

Researchers at Rockefeller University conducted a rat study and found that a mother's consumption of a fat-rich diet during pregnancy increases her offspring's risk of a combined alcohol and nicotine abuse in adolescence.

For the study, researchers by Olga Karatayev and Dr. Sarah Leibowitz developed a new approach that involves training the rats to press a lever to receive small infusions through an intravenous (IV) tube of either alcohol or nicotine alone, or of both in combination. With this method, rats begin avidly working for the drug, with the confounding factors from alcohol's bitter taste being eliminated.

They found that maternal consumption of a high-fat diet caused the offspring to treat the nicotine as more rewarding, especially when it was combined with alcohol, compared to offspring of mothers eating a low-fat diet. When a test required the young rats to work progressively harder at lever pressing, the fat-exposed rats kept working to obtain the next dose after the control rats gave up.

Maternal consumption of fat also caused the rats to take significantly larger amounts of the alcohol plus nicotine mixture than of nicotine alone, an effect not evident in the low-fat control condition.

The findings, which were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior, demonstrates for the first time that exposure to a fat-rich diet in utero makes them more likely to use alcohol and nicotine during adolescence.