A Harvard School of Public Health study assessed whether fatty acids found in dairy products could help protect against the development of allergies in children.
The researchers assessed milk and dairy intake during pregnancy and monitored the prevalence of asthma and allergic rhinitis (hay fever) using registries and questionnaires in the Danish National Birth Cohort.
The results showed that milk intake during pregnancy was not associated with increased risk of developing asthma, and it actually protected against asthma development.
However, women who ate low-fat yoghurt with fruit once a day were 1.6-times more likely to have children who developed asthma by age 7, compared with children of women who reported no intake.
"This is the first study of its kind to link low-fat yoghurt intake during pregnancy with an increased risk of asthma and hay fever in children,” said lead author Ekaterina Maslova.
“This could be due to a number of reasons and we will further investigate whether this is linked to certain nutrients or whether people who ate yoghurt regularly had similar lifestyle and dietary patterns which could explain the increased risk of asthma.”
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