Healthy diet may reduce risk of birth defects

A way to prevent early nutritional child abuse.

Women run a lower risk of having babies with certain birth defects if they eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains during their childbearing years, a new study suggests.

Women who followed healthy Mediterranean-style diets in the year before pregnancy were up to one-half as likely as those who ate diets high in meat, fat, and sugar to have a baby with anencephaly, a neural-tube defect that blocks the development of the brain and tends to result in miscarriage.

Compared with fat- and sugar-heavy diets, healthier diets -- which included plenty of folate, iron, and calcium -- were also associated with up to a one-third lower risk of cleft lip, a one-quarter lower risk of cleft palate, and a one-fifth lower risk of spina bifida, another neural-tube defect.

"Diet quality matters, and it was protective," says Suzan L. Carmichael, Ph.D., the lead author of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, in Palo Alto, California.

Another reason why the fat should not reproduce.