Pregnant females develop hormonal adaptations throughout pregnancy to change how their body uses nutrients and allow those nutrients to redirect to their growing offspring. One of these hormonal adaptations is that the mother becomes less responsive to insulin to redirect sugars from her own tissues to that of her offspring. In this work, late pregnant beef cattle were tested to determine if the strength of this adaptation depends on how much energy they had consumed before calving. Beef cattle that did not consume enough energy had indicators that they were mobilizing more of their body reserves, and they also responded more to insulin compared to those that were consuming more energy before calving than they needed.

Read the full article in the Journal of Animal Science.