2018 may be remembered as the Year Of The Mediterranean Diet. We’ve been bombarded with anecdotal accounts of its healthfulness and almost weekly revelations in respected learned journals of new benefits associated with that eating regime. Now, we’re told that those benefits extend to the unborn…
The Med Diet focuses heavily on fresh Fruits and Veggies as well as
Poultry and Seafood. In some senses, it just makes sense.
We’ve heard repeatedly that the Mediterranean Diet is beneficial to heart health and maintaining a normal weight, and hardly a week goes by that some new preventive or curative effect is not attributed to it.
Now, we have the results of the first study of the effects on children of the Med Diet, and the news is, again, good.
Starting in the womb…
The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, comes from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) in Spain. And they should be experts on the Med Diet, since they’re immediately adjacent to the Med.
Data from over 2,700 pregnant women from Asturias, Guipúzcoa, Sabadell and Valencia, who are part of the INMA-Childhood and Environment cohort was analysed. The women filled in a questionnaire on dietary intake in the first and third trimester of pregnancy. In addition, the diet, weight and height of their offspring were followed-up from birth to age 4 years. Other tests such as blood analysis and blood pressure were also performed at age 4.
What they found…
Pregnant women who followed the Mediterranean diet more closely had a 32 percent lower risk of having children with an accelerated growth pattern, as compared to offspring of women that did not follow such diet.
Sílvia Fernández, Lead Author of the study, underlines that, “Mothers with lower adherence to the Mediterranean diet were younger, consumed more calories, and had higher probability of smoking and a lower education and social level compared to those women who did follow the diet.”
The study did not find a correlation between Mediterranean diet in pregnancy and a reduction in cardiometabolic risk (blood pressure or cholesterol) in early infancy. “The effects on cardiometabolic risk could appear later in childhood,” explains Fernández.
What it means…
“These results support the hypothesis that a healthy diet during pregnancy can have a beneficial effect for child development,” says study coordinator Dora Romaguera.
I guess we all knew this, but to specifically recommend the Mediterranean Diet as a benefit to both mother and child in pregnancy is something new. It just adds to the preponderance of evidence indicating that the Med Diet is the way to go for optimum health.
Too bad Seafood and fresh Produce cost so much…
That’s going to keep poorer folks from taking advantage of the Med Diet as a means to improving their health. The cheapest foods tend to be high-Calorie, high-Sugar, high-Salt and high-Fat processed foods. And that grim reality has many folks at the lower end of the economic scale trapped in an unhealthy lifestyle. Maybe we should focus more on getting better food to those folks and less on creating the next Fast Food Fad…
~ Maggie J.