A Swedish study has found that children whose mothers’ diets include cow’s milk have a reduced risk of allergy.
The study, which was carried out by Chalmers University of Technology in partnership with Stockholm’s Karonlinska Institutet, the University of Gothenburg and Umeå University tried to establish the role that cow’s milk in a mother’s diet played in the development of child allergies.
The study is pertinent as the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) reports that childhood allergies have risen by 100% over the past decade, with growing numbers of children visiting both GPs for long-standing chronic allergies and A&E departments for critical events.
Some of the most common allergies seen among European children include the following:
Although it has long been accepted that genetic factors play a significant part, scientific understanding of the role of diet in the emergence of allergies is still developing.
“Diet is a factor where parents themselves can have direct influence,” said one of the researchers.
Inevitably, the results of the study have raised some concern about the growing popularity of a dairy-free diet in western cultures, including among pregnant women, as this could potentially mean that the problem of childhood allergies will become even more pronounced over the coming years.
The study included around 500 women and asked them to carefully detail their intake of food during pregnancy (this was verified using biomarkers in the blood) together with the incidence of allergies among their children at one year of age. Researchers reported that 7.7% of children had an allergy, with the most common allergies being to eggs or cow’s milk or both. Furthermore, 6.5% had been diagnosed with atopic eczema, with the same number also experiencing asthma.
The researchers concluded that there is a “clear connection” between maternal consumption of milk and dairy and the prevalence of food allergies in their children, with mothers who avoided dairy having a much higher rate of food allergies among their offspring.
The researchers were eager to stress that drinking milk during pregnancy should not be considered as “a general cure for food allergies”. Despite this, the scientists hypothesised that cow’s milk may serve to stimulate the developing immune system and to help develop tolerance for different foods.
The research is not yet complete as there will be a follow-up study once the children reach four years of age.
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