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2007-8-31 15:27:42 |
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Women who eat apples and fish during pregnancy may reduce risk of allergies and asthma in their children, according to a new study presented at the American Thoracic Society 2007 International Conference, held on Sunday May 20 in San Francisco. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen in the UK conducted the study and found that the children who were born to mothers who ate the most apples were less likely to have ever wheezed or had doctor-confirmed asthma by the age of five years. Similarly, children of mothers who ate fish once or more a week were less likely to have had eczema than children of mothers who never ate fish. The protective effect against asthma or allergic disease was not found in other foods including vegetables, fruit juice, citrus or kiwi fruit, whole grain products, dairy fat or margarine or other low fat spreads, according to the study. The study involved 1212 pregnant mothers who filled out food questionnaires during pregnancy. When their children were five years old, they filled out a questionnaire about their children's food consumption and a questionnaire about their children's respiratory systems and allergies. In addition, children were given lung function and allergy tests. Saskia Willers, M. Sc. of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said previous studies in the same children resulted in evidence indicating that intake of vitamin E and D and zinc during pregnancy provided protection against wheeze and asthma in children. If the new results are confirmed, "recommendations on dietary modification during pregnancy may help to prevent childhood asthma and allergy," she says. Willers concludes that a mother’s diet during pregnancy might be more influential on a child's reparatory health during the first five years of life than the child's own diet. She suggests that antioxidants called flavonoids in apples and omega-3 fatty acids found in fish may be responsible for the beneficial effects. "Other studies have looked at individual nutrients? effect on asthma in pregnancy, but our study looked at specific foods during pregnancy and the subsequent development of childhood asthma and allergies, which is quite new," Willers says. "Foods contain mixtures of nutrients that may contribute more than the sum of their parts." |
