Nuts in pregnancy may decrease allergy risk in kids
Result runs counter to past studies
By Nathan Seppa
Women who eat plenty of nuts during pregnancy might reduce their children’s chances of developing a nut allergy.
Physician A. Lindsay Frazier of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in Boston and colleagues analyzed health data on 8,205 people born from 1990 to 1994, 140 of whom developed a nut allergy.
Children of nonallergic women who had consumed five or more servings of nuts per week during pregnancy were 31 percent as likely to be diagnosed with a nut allergy as those born to nonallergic moms who ate less than one serving a week. Kids born to women who consumed one to four servings of nuts a week during gestation were about half as likely to be allergic to nuts as the offspring of moms who had largely avoided them.