study conducted by researchers at Utrecht University in the
Netherlands found that expectant mothers who reported eating even a
small amount of nuts or nut products every day during their
pregnancy increased the risk of their child developing asthma by 50
per cent.
The study, featured in the July issue of the American Journal of
Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, asked about 4,000 pregnant
women to track their eating habits by listing how often they ate
vegetables, fresh fruit, fish, eggs, milk, milk products, nuts and
nut products during the month before they gave birth.
After the children were born, their diets were also followed
until age 8, with special attention to any allergies or symptoms of
asthma that might have developed.
The study found that children whose mothers reported eating nuts
on a daily basis, compared with those who rarely consumed nut
products while pregnant, were 50 per cent more likely to develop
wheezing or other asthma-related symptoms.
"We were pretty surprised to see the adverse associations between
daily versus rare nut product during pregnancy and symptoms of
asthma in children because we haven't seen this in similar previous
studies," study author Saskia Willers said in a statement.
She acknowledged that supplementary studies need to be done
before women can be advised against eating nuts during pregnancy.
Allan Becker, the head of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the
University of Manitoba, said the survey isn't enough to link nut
ingestion with asthma. He also said Europeans don't eat as many nut
products as North Americans do, which means the correlation between
nuts and asthma could be much smaller here.
Though previous studies also have shown negative effects
associated with a pregnant woman's daily diet of peanut munching,
Andree Gruslin, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the Ottawa
Hospital, said eating nuts is actually good for pregnant women.
"Although there may be a small correlation here, I think it'd be
very important for pregnant women not to take this as 'you
shouldn't eat nuts in pregnancy,' because nuts are very good for a
pregnant woman's diet," she said.
Andrea Holwegner, a Calgary, Canada-based dietitian, said she
would only tell expectant mothers to avoid nuts if there was a
history of allergy in their families.
"It's kind of a blurred area and no one's taken a firm stance on
what we should be doing," she said of the mixed research about the
diets of pregnant women.
"If there's no allergy within your family, I typically say I
don't believe research is strong enough to suggest you need to do
that," she said.
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