Eating Fruit During Pregnancy Could Make Your Child Smarter

Regular consumption of fruit is known to reduce a variety of health complications such as Alzheimer's or preventing weight gain but now new research has suggested that we may benefit from a diet high in fruit earlier than we thought.

Child development experts in Canada found that women who eat fruit during their pregnancy are more likely to give birth to smarter children than those who do not, or eat very little fruit.

Writing in the journal EbioMedicine, the researchers discovered that more who consumed more fruit during their pregnancy gave birth to children who performed better on developmental testing once they reached 12 months old.

They used data from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development Study and took information from 688 children in Edmonton. They found that pregnant mothers who ate six or seven servings of fruit or fruit juice a day had children who placed six or seven points higher on the traditional IQ scale than expected at one year of age.

Piush Mandhane, senior of author the paper and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, said: "We wanted to know if we could identify what factors affect cognitive development.

"We found that one of the biggest predictors of cognitive development was how much fruit mothers consumed during pregnancy. The more fruit they had, the higher their child's cognitive development."

In order to build on the research, Mandhane then partnered with Francois Bolduc, an associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry's Division of Pediatric Neurology, to conduct a lab test on fruit flies.

Bolduc said: "Flies are very different from humans but, surprisingly, they have 85 per cent of the genes involved in human brain function, making them a great model to study the genetics of memory.

"To be able to improve memory in individuals without genetic mutation is exceptional, so we were extremely interested in understanding the correlation seen between increase prenatal fruit intake and higher cognition."

They found that flies born after being fed an increased amount of prenatal fruit juice had a significantly better memory ability, similar to the results found in Mandhane's study on human babies.

Mandhane added that, while the results are encouraging, expectant mothers should still be careful about their fruit consumption as potential complications such as high birth weight or gestational diabetes - two conditions often associated with an increased intake of natural sugars - have not been fully researched. Instead, he recommends simply meeting the recommended daily intake.

In 2013 it was suggested by researchers that expectant mothers who eat too little fruit during their pregnancy will give birth to fussy children. The researchers found that babies who are not given early enough exposure to fruits and vegetables while in the womb are less likely to enjoy the taste and may have trouble weaning.