Dietary calcium status during maternal pregnancy and lactation affects lipid metabolism in mouse offspring

Calcium plays important roles in lipid metabolism and adipogenesis, but whether its status in early life affects later lipid profiles needs to be clarified. Three to four-week old C57BL/6J female mice were fed with three different reproductive diets containing normal, low (insufficient) and high (excessive) calcium concentrations respectively throughout pregnancy and lactation. At postnatal 21 days, the weaning male and female pups from each group were sacrificed for experiments and the remaining were fed with the normal chow diet for 16 weeks. Meanwhile, some of the weaning female pups from maternal low calcium diet group were fed with the normal calcium, low calcium and high calcium mature diets respectively for 8 weeks. Maternal insufficient or excessive calcium status during pregnancy and lactation programmed an abnormal expression of hepatic and adipose genes (PPAR-γ, C/EBP-α, FABP4, Fasn, UCP2, PPAR-α, HMG-Red1, Acc1, and SREBP-1c) in the offspring and this may lead to dyslipidemia and accumulation of hepatic triglyceride (TG) and total cholesterol (TC) in later life. The effects of maternal calcium status on lipid metabolism were found only in the female adult offspring, but were similar between offspring males and females at postnatal 21 days. Additionally, the dyslipidemia and hepatic lipid accumulation caused by insufficient calcium status in early life may be reversed to some extent by dietary calcium supplementation in later life.