 We found in our study in rats that fresh fish oil given during pregnancy did improve a major diabetes risk factor in their pups. But we're not recommending that pregnant women take fish oil at this time. And that's because we haven't shown benefits in humans yet. And because our previous work has shown that when a woman buys a fish oil supplement, she can't be sure that it's fresh. You might be surprised to know that up to one in five pregnant women in New Zealand take fish oil, believing it to be of benefit to their health and the health of their babies. Other studies and adults have shown that fish oil may be protective against diabetes. So we wanted to know whether giving fish oil during pregnancy may be protective for their children. We took pregnant rats and we either fed them a high-fat diet to make them overweight or a standard diet, and then half of those rats got a fresh fish oil supplement. We then assessed diabetes risk factors in the offspring after they had grown up all the way through to adulthood. And what we found was that in the offspring of the high-fat diet group, the overweight group, if the mother received a fresh fish oil, then it improved the way insulin worked in the offspring. And that means that it reduced their risk of diabetes. This is important because the children of overweight mothers are twice as likely to develop problems like diabetes as they become adults. We also know that about 30% of pregnant women are overweight. So this is leading us to design a clinical study to look at the benefits of fish oil and overweight pregnant women to see if it has the same protective benefits. In the meantime, we don't recommend that pregnant women take fish oil, and that's because of two of our previous findings. In the first, we looked at fish oil supplements available to purchase in New Zealand and we found that most of them were oxidised above recommended limits, meaning that they'd gone off. And when we looked at the packaging, nothing written on the packaging could help a person work out whether the supplement they wanted to buy was going to be oxidised or fresh. In the second study, we gave a highly oxidised fish oil to pregnant rats and what we found is that it increased the number of babies who died soon after birth. A really dramatic finding. Now, unfortunately, we don't know what the safe level of oxidation is in fish oil taken by pregnant women. And so in the meantime, we'd recommend that pregnant women got their omega-3s from consuming oily fish.