Eating low-fat yoghurt during pregnancy may affect your child's health
Eating low-fat yoghurt during pregnancy can increase the risk of your child developing asthama and hay fever, new research suggests.
The study aimed to assess whether fatty acids found in dairy products could protect against the development of allergic diseases in children.
The diets of more than 70,000 Danish women were analysed and their children followed until the age of seven.
The results showed that women who are low-fat yogurt with fruit once a day were 1.6 times more likely to have children who developed asthma by the age of seven.
Ekaterina Maslova, lead author from the Harvard School of Public Health, who has been working with data at the Centre for Fetal Programming at Statens Serum Institut, said:
“This is the first study of its kind to link low-fat yoghurt intake during pregnancy with an increased risk of asthma and hay fever in children. This could be due to a number of reasons and we will further investigate whether this is linked to certain nutrients or whether people who ate yoghurt regularly had similar lifestyle and dietary patterns which could explain the increased risk of asthma.”
The study also found that the milk intake during pregnancy was not associated with the increased risk of developing asthma and it actually protected against it developing.
The researchers suggest that non-fat related nutrient components in the yoghurt may play a part in increasing this risk. They are also looking at the possibility that low-fat yoghurt intake may serve as a marker for other dietary and lifestyle factors.