Pregnant Mothers: Eat Greens to Lower Child’s Diabetes Risk
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A new study out of Sweden suggests children are half as likely to develop Type 1 diabetes if their mother ate vegetables daily while pregnant.
The University of Gothenberg released the study today to high interest in its home country, which, along with Sweden, shares the world’s highest Type 1 diabetes rates.
The study covered 6,000 five-year-old Swedish children, 3 percent of whom either had Type 1 diabetes or were at high risk to develop the disease. Among the children studied, those whose mothers ate few vegetables during pregnancy had double the risk of having Type 1; those whose mothers ate vegetables every day were at the lowest risk.
Study author Hilde Brekke, a clinical nutritionist at the university, admitted that the study doesn’t scientifically prove that eating vegetables while pregnant will lower the risk of disease for children, but it provides a big building block for future studies.
