Fishy pregnancies can be good news

The State Column, Tom Sherman | January 23, 2015 New research shows women that eat fish during their pregnancies are more likely to have smarter, healthier babies.  Normally when a woman talks about a fishy pregnancy, people begin to phone the producers at Maury. However, the FDA now hopes more women in America will experience fishy circumstances throughout their prenatal term. “For years many women have limited or avoided eating fish during pregnancy or feeding fish to their young children,” said Stephen Ostroff, M.D., the FDA’s acting chief scientist. “But emerging science now tells us that limiting or avoiding fish during pregnancy and early childhood can mean missing out on important nutrients that can have a positive impact on growth and development as well as on general health.” Over the past decades people and scientists alike frowned upon the frequent consumption of fish– especially by pregnant women– due to the belief that trace amounts of mercury found in seafood could have an adverse effect. Researchers recently studied a group of 20-month old babies, and those with the highest exposures to mercury scored the best in the Psychomotor Developmental Index (PDI), a test that studies learned motor skills like rolling over. “Prenatal [mercury] exposure had no direct associations with neurodevelopmental outcomes,” wrote J.J. Strain, PhD of the University of Ulster, in Ireland, lead author of the study published in the online version of the American...
Source: Cord Blood News - Category: Perinatology & Neonatology Authors: Tags: babies brain development Cord Blood medical research parents pregnancy cooked fish fish and pregnancy mercury Source Type: blogs