Your Pregnancy Diet & Your Child’s Health

If you’re thinking of getting pregnant again, you might want to increase your intake of vitamin D. The body naturally produces vitamin D when the skin is exposed to sunlight and it is often added to milk products.

The extra vitamin D may help prevent childhood asthma says a study released at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

A USA Today report on the study says:

• …expectant mothers who take higher amounts of vitamin D may decrease their child’s risk for asthma.
• Vitamin D deficiency is common in areas where asthma is also widespread, raising the suspicion that the two are linked, said Dr. Carlos Camargo, senior author of the study and an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
• Camargo and his team followed 1,300 mother-child pairs for more than three years.
• By the time the children were 2 years old, there was already a clear association between higher vitamin D intake when the mother was pregnant and lower risk of wheezing and asthma in the children, he said at a news conference Saturday in Miami Beach.