Article Text
Abstract
Background Good nutrition is essential for individual health, a notion that is particularly true during pregnancy. We have used a nutrition index that measures the adequacy of one’s diet relative to the unique nutritional needs of individuals due to, for example, their activity level, dietary restrictions, lifestyle and body size. The use of this personalised metric of dietary nutritiousness in the analysis of prenatal environmental exposures and developmental outcomes permits testing for potential mitigating effects of good nutrition. We also provide an analysis strategy for investigating the balance in beneficial food sources which are also the source of environmental toxicants.
Methods A holistic measure of nutrition, My Nutrition Index (MNI), measures the nutrient quality (ie, ‘nutritiousness’) of a specified daily diet. MNI is calculated based on quantification of dozens of macronutrients and micronutrients that are specific to an individual’s nutritional needs by incorporating dietary restrictions, subject characteristics, activity level and health behaviours. The Swedish Environmental, Longitudinal, Mother and child, Asthma and allergy Study is a Swedish pregnancy cohort, with prenatal endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) exposure and dietary data available. This makes it possible to test for the potential mitigating effects of good nutrition on health and development effects in offspring from EDCs.
Results Using prenatal Food Frequency Questionnaire data to construct an individual’s MNI, the index was significantly and positively associated with important metabolic outcome (as measured by birth weight) and cognitive function at age 7 years (as measured by WISC IQ) in children when adjusted for covariates and prenatal concentrations of an EDC. In a stratified analysis of ‘low’ and ‘high’ fish consumption, a potential source of perfluoro-octanesulfonic acid (PFOS), the association between PFOS and birth weight was diminished in the high consumption group compared with the low consumption group.
Conclusions Thus, MNI is evidently a metric of the general nutritiousness of daily diets and is useful in environmental health studies in representing the impact of good nutrition, even during pregnancy.
- cognitive performance
- nutrition assessment
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Footnotes
Contributors CG: conceptualisation, methodology, software, formal analysis, writing the original draft, project administration, funding acquisition. AW: data curation, writing review and editing. NH: data curation. CL: resources, writing review and editing. C-GB: investigation, writing, reviewing and editing, project administration, funding acquisition.
Funding This research received support from the NIEHS (#R01ES028811) for methods work and support for SELMA by the EDC-MixRisk (#634880) European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval The study was approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board (Uppsala, Sweden).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data sharing policies will be in agreement with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and SAS code for analysis will be available upon request.