Digestible Carbohydrate Intake and Maternal-Infant Outcomes: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background. Optimal nutrition is needed to support individuals during pregnancy and placental development, fetal growth, and growth and development during infancy. Many foods contain digestible carbohydrates, or carbohydrates other than fiber/nondigestible carbohydrate. Digestible carbohydrates, including sugars and starches, are important sources of energy during these life stages. This review was designed to identify and summarize the evidence on the relationships between digestible carbohydrate intake during pregnancy and newborn size and development (Key Question 1) and gestational weight gain (Key Question 2), and between infant digestible carbohydrate intake and infant growth parameters, size, and body composition from birth to 24 months of age (Key Question 3). The results are intended to contribute to the update and expansion of the 2005 United States-Canadian Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) for macronutrients. Methods. A medical research librarian designed and conducted a search of Ovid MEDLINE®, EMBASE, and Cochrane CENTRAL from 2000 to April 2025. Researchers manually reviewed reference lists. Using a priori specified inclusion and exclusion criteria, we triaged abstracts and conducted a dual, independent review of full-text articles. Risk of bias was assessed using criteria based on study design. Meta-analyses were not conducted due to limited data and heterogeneity of studies; included studies were synthesized qualitatively and described in tables and text. Results. Searches identified 3,194 abstracts. Eight studies in 10 publications were included for the three Key Questions. One randomized controlled trial was rated low risk of bias and a second was rated high; three nonrandomized studies were rated moderate and three were rated high risk of bias. Identified studies yielded low strength of evidence of no difference in infant weight, and insufficient evidence for length, head circumference, or size (small or large for gestational age) at birth (Key Question 1) and low strength of evidence of no difference in gestational weight gain given different amounts of digestible carbohydrate intake during pregnancy (Key Question 2). Evidence was insufficient to reach conclusions about the relationship between digestible carbohydrate intake by infants and growth outcomes (weight, length, and head circumference) and body mass index or other body composition outcomes up to 24 months of age (Key Question 3). Conclusions. We identified a small number of studies resulting in findings of no differences in infant size at birth and gestational weight gain by amount of digestible carbohydrate consumed during pregnancy. There was insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion about the relationship between the amount of digestible carbohydrate consumed during infancy and growth parameters and body composition up to 24 months of age. Factors contributing to the limited evidence available to answer the key questions in this review include: “digestible carbohydrate” is not commonly used in the scientific literature to categorize dietary carbohydrates as the alternative to fiber/nondigestible carbohydrate; most studies identified, those included in or excluded from the evidence base, were not designed to answer this review’s key questions; and there is an increasing trend toward reporting dietary consumption patterns instead of isolated nutrients and using principal component analysis to categorize and analyze dietary consumption patterns. While both types of information are important to informing how diet affects health, analyses of patterns do not provide the specific quantitative information needed for a systematic review of the effect of digestible carbohydrate consumption on maternal and infant outcomes. The limited evidence and our concerns about the lack of methodologic standardization and the validity of dietary intake measurement used to estimate usual dietary intake during pregnancy and lactation and of infants consuming human milk reduced our confidence in the findings and support the need for additional and more rigorous research on this topic.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".