The right pregnancy diet for your child’s health

Women who follow a Mediterranean diet while pregnant could help stave off asthma and allergies in their children, a new study suggests. The traditional Mediterranean diet is rich in plant-based foods—vegetables, fruits, whole grain breads and cereals, legumes, and nuts—as well as olive oil and fish. Adherents consume low to moderate amounts of dairy products and eggs, lesser amounts of white meat, and infrequently eat red meat. Some studies have suggested that such eating patterns can lower children’s odds of asthma symptoms and skin and nasal allergies. Researchers at the University of Crete in Greece followed 460 mother/child pairs, from pregnancy until the children were six years old. The researchers found that the majority of mothers scored high in Mediterranean diet. Children whose mothers ate eight or more vegetable servings per week during pregnancy were less likely to develop persistent wheezing. The same was true of children whose mothers ate three or more fish servings a week.

Gastric bypass surgery controls diabetes
Obesity surgery can cause Type 2 diabetes to go into remission, but much depends on how much weight the patient loses within the first few months, a new study suggests. Gastric bypass surgery for severe obesity has been shown to control Type 2 diabetes, a disorder that commonly goes hand-in-hand with obesity. The procedure involves sectioning off a small portion of the stomach, creating a pouch that limits the amount of food a person can eat in one sitting. The new study, by surgeons at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, shows that hormones are not the whole story. The amount of weight patients shed in the first six months after surgery appears key to diabetes remission.

Vitamin D helps colorectal cancer patients
Vitamin D may extend the lives of people with colon and rectal cancer, according to a study. Previous research has indicated that people with higher levels of vitamin D may be less likely to develop colon and rectal cancer, also called colorectal cancer.
The new study at the Cancer Institute in Boston involved 304 men and women diagnosed with colorectal cancer from 1991 to 2002, to see if higher levels of vitamin D in the patients affected their survival chances. The researchers in the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, used blood samples to determine vitamin D levels of the patients, and they were tracked for an average of about six-and-a-half years. Those in the highest 25 percent of vitamin D levels were about 50 percent less likely to die during the study from their cancer or any other cause compared to the patients in the lowest 25 percent of vitamin D levels.