According to a new study, women who have healthy diets during pregnancy are less likely to have a baby born with heart diseases.
About 1 percent of babies born in the United States have congenital heart defects, and according to the study published in the British Medical Journal, it is fatal in one in four affected babies.
There is little solid evidence as to how risks in dangerous birth defects increases, which is why the researchers who conducted the study gained insight on the influence of mothers' diets.
"The more you went up in diet quality, the less the risk for severe congenital heart anomalies," according to lead author Dr. Lorenzo Botto, a pediatrics and a medical geneticist professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
According to Headlines & Global News, the researchers were able to gather their findings by surveying 19,000 women as to the quantity and quality of their diet during the year prior to giving birth. Half of the women had healthy babies while the other half's babies had heart defects. The researchers reportedly assessed the participants' diets with the use of the Mediterranean Diet Score and the Diet Quality Index for Pregnancy (DQI-P).
The women with healthy diets had 37 percent less chances than those eating poorly of having babies with tetralogy of Fallot, "a complex heart defect causing babies to turn blue because their blood can't transmit enough oxygen." Those same women also had 23 percent less chances of having babies born with atrial septal defect, or a hole in the heart's wall, separating its top two chambers.
According to the study authors, pregnant women and their babies will get most out of a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, legumes and fish. They also need to limit dairy intake, as well as meat and sweets, according to the researchers. Also considered healthy were foods rich in nutrients such as folic acid, iron and calcium.
Despite their conclusions, the authors said that the study does not show a cause-and-effect relationship between a healthy diet and a lower risk of heart birth defects, but only an association between the two, according to WebMD.
