March 5, 2002
VITAL SIGNS
Nutrition: Of Healthy Babies and Fishy Diets
By JOHN O'NEIL
Pregnant
women who never ate fish were more than three times as likely to deliver
prematurely or have underweight babies as women who ate fish at least once a
week, a new Danish study has found.
An earlier study of women in the Faroe Islands, where fish makes up a large part of the daily diet, had found unusually few premature or low-birth-weight babies there, and some experiments with fish oil supplements have suggested that the kinds of fat found in fish, known as n-3 fatty acids, can play a role in the difference.
The new study, conducted at the Skejby University Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark, involved more than 8,000 pregnant women who were surveyed twice during prenatal care about their diet.
Those who ate no fish were 3.6 times as likely to deliver prematurely as those in the group that ate at least one main course of fish each week.
The researchers suggested that pregnant women be encouraged to eat fish or take fish-oil supplements.
