Kids are traditionally the ones
nagged to eat their veggies because "they're good for
you." While this is indubitably true, new research says
that mums-to-be need to chow down on veggies too. A study
published in the August issue of Cancer Causes and
Control claims that women who eat fruit and vegetables
before pregnancy give birth to children who are less likely
to develop leukemia, the most common childhood cancer.
Even more surprising, there seems to be similar protective
effect with meat protein, which is more often linked with
causing cancer than preventing it.
Researchers from Berkeley University
compared the diets of 138 mothers of children with acute
lymphoblastic leukemia to the food intakes of a control
group of 138 women with demographically-matched healthy
children. The study recorded what the mothers ate in
the 12 months prior to pregnancy.
Children of women in the highest
tertile for vegetable consumption ran only 53% of the
risk of developing leukemia that kids of women in the
lowest tertile faced. For fruit, the highest-consumption
tertile were only 71% as likely to have a child who
later developed leukemia. And kids of mothers in the
highest tertile for protein consumption ran a low 40%
risk of disease compared to kids of mums in the lowest
tertile.
String beans, carrots and cantaloupe
were particularly protective, with nutrients like carotenoids
and glutathione playing the biggest role in leukemia
prevention. The latter is found in meat, explaining
why animal protein is beneficial.
One weakness of this study is that
it didn't measure dietary intake during pregnancy �
though it seems obvious that women who ate better prior
to conception would have continued doing so. The claim
that eating well before pregnancy prevents childhood
leukemia is not therefore strictly tenable. But that
seems a minor caveat.
Lead author Dr Christopher Jensen
said it's vital "that women hoping to get pregnant,
as well as expectant mums, understand that critical
nutrients may protect the health of their unborn children."
Co-author Patricia Buffler, PhD,
added: "It goes back to the old saying to expectant
mothers, 'You're eating for two.' We're starting to
see the importance of the prenatal environment, since
the events that may lead to leukemia are possibly initiated
in utero." US National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences director Kenneth Olden, PhD, comments, "This
is the first time researchers have conducted a systematic
survey of a woman's diet and linked it to the risk of
childhood leukemia."
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