Mothers-to-be take note. The better your diet, the less chance your child will develop birth defects. A new study has found that women who ate a low-fat and high fiber diet a year prior to becoming pregnant are less likely to have children with neural tube defects and orofacial clefts.
Suzan L. Carmichael, Ph.D., from Stanford University, Stanford, California, and her colleagues used data from the National Birth Defects Prevention Study to examine whether better maternal diet quality was associated with reduced risk for selected birth defects.
They interviewed women from 10 states, with due dates between 1997 and 2005, about their eating habits immediately before and during pregnancy. The subjects included 3,824 women whose fetuses or infants had a neural tube defect or a cleft lip or palate, and 6,807 women with healthy infants.
The researchers developed two diet quality indices that focused on overall diet quality based on the Mediterranean Diet (Mediterranean Diet Score or MDS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Guide Pyramid (Diet Quality Index or DQI). "Increasing diet quality based on either index was associated with reduced risks for the birth defects studied," the researchers found.
"Based on two diet quality indices, higher maternal diet quality in the year before pregnancy was associated with lower risk for neural tube defects and orofacial clefts. This finding persisted even after adjusting for multiple potential confounders such as maternal intake of vitamin/mineral supplements," they write.
"These results suggest that dietary approaches could lead to further reduction in risks of major birth defects and complement existing efforts to fortify foods and encourage periconceptional multivitamin use," the authors concluded. The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine has published the study online.