And I’m Hungry Like the Mom: Influences on Appetite During Pregnancy and Postpartum

Maternal eating patterns during pregnancy and the first year postpartum contribute to short and long term maternal and child health outcomes. Food choices are thought to result from an interaction between individual-level appetite and the diversity and quantity of foods available to the individual. Appetite, the motivational drive to eat, is regulated by both internal and environmental factors and occurs both within and outside of physiological energy deprivation. Through a series of three manuscripts, this work examined psychophysiological influences on maternal appetite and their interrelations to understand how these factors present in pregnancy and postpartum, how they change over time, and their role in predicting the development of specific food desires. The Power of Food Scale (PFS), a measure of hedonic hunger, assesses perceived responsiveness to food stimuli in the environment. PFS retains stable psychometric properties and remains at similar levels across its subscales through pregnancy and the first year postpartum. In contrast, leptin, a hormone with roles in satiety, reward, and reproduction, shows positive mean change over the same time. Neither of these appetitive influences nor dietary restraint were associated with variability in cravings concurrently or prospectively, during pregnancy or postpartum. Overall, results of these studies suggest that these appetite influences vary relatively independently during pregnancy and postpartum, in contrast to relationships observed outside this time. Future research could build upon these findings by incorporating additional appetitive influences and/or increasing the frequency of assessments to capture fluctuations within trimesters or within the first year postpartum.