Pennington launches new program to help low-income women maintain healthy weight during pregnancy

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Scientists at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge have announced a new program they hope will help low-income moms during pregnancy.

The goal is to improve lifestyle habits and promote healthy weight gain. They say gaining too much or too little weight can not only have impacts on the pregnancy, but also long after, leading to increased risks of heart disease and diabetes for the mother and her child.

“The nutrition of a mother in pregnancy really lays the foundation for how a child grows throughout childhood and the diseases they develop as an adult, so therefore, if we intervene during pregnancy and we help women to eat more healthy, to make more healthy lifestyle choices, we have a chance to overturn this inter-generational inheritance of chronic disease," said Dr. Leanne Redman, director of reproductive endocrinology at Pennington.

Right now, the Healthy Beginnings program is working to build a curriculum that can work for moms receiving WIC benefits. They hope to have that finalized by July.

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