Pregnancy is a time when advice is something you won’t be short on. For some reason people regard a reproductive bulge in a woman’s abdomen as a license to offer wisdom on everything from how to sleep effectively to how to breathe when the moment of birth arrives. This innate human tendency to believe that one’s own understanding of child rearing is both revolutionary and in need of adoption by the general populace has spawned a publishing industry and while this space doesn’t really need another addition a new study does have some new, and relatively easy, advice for pregnant mothers.
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The new study involved 688 children born in Edmonton, Canada. For the study the mothers completed surveys indicating what they ate while they were pregnant. Then the children were given IQ test at one year of age. To give context to the findings, the average IQ is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 meaning that two thirds of the population fall between 85 and 115.
To control for other potential influencing factors the researchers statistically allowed for things like family income, paternal and maternal education, and the gestational age of the child at birth.
Allowing for all of these factors there was a significant relationship between how much fruit a woman ate while pregnant and the IQ of her child. In fact, if a pregnant woman ate six or seven servings of fruit or fruit juice a day their children placed six or seven points higher on the IQ scale at one year of age than women who ate no fruit.
These researchers note that similar findings exist in species as diverse from humans as fruit flies suggesting there is an ancient evolutionary mechanism at work here. Whatever that mechanism it seems that eating well when pregnant is certainly fruitful for your baby.
