According to USA Today, a new study suggests that pregnant women should be conscious of their diet and avoid any restricting diets that include low-carb and gluten-free limitations. The study was published in a scholarly journal called Birth Defects Research, which specifically looks at the relationship between an unborn child and restrictive diets of their pregnant mother.
The study explains that there could be a specific correlation to birth defects and pregnant mothers who are on low-carb diets. Lead author of the study, Tania Desrosiers, suggests that those children are more likely to have fatal neural tube defects.
The study looked closely at two separate groups of mothers: 1,740 mothers who had babies with a various of birth defects and 9,545 mothers who had healthy babies from 1998 to 2011. The infants with birth defects ranged from stillbirths, anencephaly, to even spina bifida. Anencephaly is when parts of the skull or brain are missing, while spina bifida is a defect within the spinal cord.
Researchers looked closely at the data and found that women who had low-carb diets had a 30% increased risk of having a child with a neural tube birth defect as opposed to mothers who didn’t. These women were most likely wealthy, educated, older and white.
Something to note is that when one consumes fewer carbohydrates, one is usually then also consuming less folic acid. In 1998 the FDA mandated that “enriched grains” be fortified with folic acid and allowed breakfast cereals to be fortified. In April of 2016 the FDA approved folic acid fortification of corn masa flour. According to the CDC, the neural tube defect prevalence rate has decreased by about 35%, since the institution of mandatory fortification.