Infant Food Allergies Could Be Lessened With Certain Prenatal Diets: Study

For example, researchers indicate that avocados contain nutrients that may boost the developing fetus’s immune system.

New research indicates that infants born to mothers who eat avocados during pregnancy have a lower risk of developing food allergies in their first year of life, suggesting that there could be many health benefits associated with optimizing prenatal diets.

The findings were published in the journal Pediatric Research on March 7, showing that what a mother consumes during pregnancy may greatly impact her child’s immune system and risk of suffering food allergies.

Previous research has determined that what breastfeeding mothers eat can have a protective benefit for their newborn’s immune system. Australian researchers found earlier this year that newborns fed breast milk in the first three days of life have a lower risk of food allergies.

Additional studies have also shown that what women eat while pregnant can have an effect on their child’s immune system. However, the potential benefits of avocados in particular do not appear to have been studied before.

For this study, researchers from the University of Eastern Finland teamed up with researchers from the Haas Avocado Board to assess whether avocado consumption during pregnancy provided any protective benefits to offspring. 

The team used data from the Kuopio Birth Cohort (KuBiCo) Study, including 4,600 participants who gave birth at Kuopio University Hospital in Finland. Among those participants, nearly 2,300 met the criteria and were included in the analysis.

The researchers compared avocado consumption during pregnancy, defined as having eaten any amount of avocado during the first and third trimesters, to no consumption during pregnancy, which was defined as eating 0 grams of avocado during both trimesters one and three. Participants completed follow up questionnaires one year later, reporting if their children experienced allergic outcomes like rhinitis, paroxysmal wheezing, atopic eczema and food allergies.

According to the findings, children had a 44% lower risk of having a food allergy if their mother consumed avocados during pregnancy, when compared to those whose mothers did not eat avocados.

Overall, children of mothers who ate avocados had a 2% risk of developing a food allergy. However, children born to mothers who didn’t consume avocados had a 4% risk of developing food allergies.

Researchers said what mothers eat during pregnancy can affect their children’s health and consuming certain nutrients, such as those found in avocados might improve those outcomes.

Avocados contain monounsaturated fats, fiber and antioxidants. These nutrients may contribute to immune system development. However, researchers said that if there is a specific biological mechanism involved in avocado consumption, more research is needed to determine what that is.