This article was published by the Telegraph. The original article is at www.telegraph.co.uk.
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, Telegraph
20th January 2006
Pregnant women who eat more fish, which contains omega-3 fatty acids, tend to have brighter, more sociable children, claim researchers.
The amount of omega-3 helps to determine the child´s intelligence, fine motor skills - the ability to manipulate small objects and hand and eye co-ordination - and the propensity to anti-social behaviour, says a study by Dr Joseph Hibbeln, of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
The findings, which were presented to a meeting in London this week, show that the children of women who consumed the smallest amounts of omega-3 fatty acids during their pregnancies had a verbal IQ six points lower than average.
This is striking because pregnant women have been advised to limit their consumption of oily fish and seafood in order to avoid exposing their foetuses to trace amounts of dioxins and brain-damaging methyl mercury.
Dr Hibbeln, whose research is reported today in the Economist, says that his work shows that the benefits of eating such foods vastly outweigh the risks. The findings show that the children of women who consumed the smallest amounts of omega-3 fatty acids during their pregnancies had a verbal IQ six points lower than average.
Dr Hibbeln worked with Prof Jean Golding from Bristol University´s Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which has data on 14,000 expectant mothers and their offspring, so that he could study the effects of omega-3 intake.
The researchers found that at 3½ years of age, those children with the best measures of motor performance had mothers with the highest intake of omega-3s. A low intake during pregnancy led to higher levels of pathological social interactions such as an inability to make friends as a child grew up, which are also linked to antisocial behaviour in later life.
About 14 per cent of seven-year-olds whose mothers had the lowest intake of omega-3s in pregnancy demonstrated such behaviour, compared with eight per cent born to women on high-intake.
Fish is a good source of omega-3 but because of dioxins, the Food Standards Agency recommends that women who might have a child one day, and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, should have only two portions of oily fish a week.
by the Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk, 2006
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