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According to a new study, fol­low­ing a Mediterranean diet might help cur­tail one of the most com­mon health prob­lems affect­ing new­borns.

Small for Gestational Age (SGA) is a con­di­tion that affects 27 per­cent of all births glob­ally and can lead to breath­ing and oxy­gena­tion prob­lems for new­borns and fur­ther health prob­lems as they become adults.

The new research pub­lished in the Journal of the American Medical Association focused on the effects of fol­low­ing the Mediterranean diet and the adop­tion of mind­ful­ness-based stress reduc­tion tech­niques on preg­nant women. Both were com­pared to usual care.

Researchers ana­lyzed a sam­ple of more than 1,200 women with sin­gle­ton preg­nan­cies at high SGA risk. Scientists work­ing in the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona divided the sam­ple into three groups.

The first one – focused on the Mediterranean diet – received two hours monthly of indi­vid­ual and group edu­ca­tional ses­sions. Those par­tic­i­pants were also given sup­ple­ments of extra vir­gin olive oil and wal­nuts.

The sec­ond group worked with stress reduc­tion tech­niques for eight weeks, while the third group was cared for accord­ing to the exist­ing insti­tu­tional pro­to­cols.

“The pri­mary end­point was the per­cent­age of new­borns who were SGA at deliv­ery, defined as birth weight below the 10^th per­centile,” wrote the researchers.

“The sec­ondary end­point was a com­pos­ite adverse peri­na­tal out­come (at least one of the fol­low­ing: preterm birth, preeclamp­sia, peri­na­tal mor­tal­ity, severe SGA, neona­tal aci­do­sis, low Apgar score or pres­ence of any major neona­tal mor­bid­ity),” they added.

Of the 1,184 women who com­pleted the trial, 88 new­borns from the con­trol group were afflicted with SGA. In the Mediterranean diet group, this num­ber dropped to 55, while the stress reduc­tion tech­niques group had 61 SGA births.

The num­bers sug­gest that adopt­ing the Mediterranean diet almost halved the SGA risk. Similar ben­e­fi­cial effects of fol­low­ing the Mediterranean diet also were reported for the out­comes of spe­cific SGA births inves­ti­gated by the researchers.

While the results once again pro­mote the Mediterranean diet for preg­nancy, researchers warned that the study should only be con­sid­ered pre­lim­i­nary.

They stressed the rel­e­vance of repli­cat­ing these research find­ings in fol­low-up stud­ies and other pop­u­la­tions before rec­om­mend­ing the Mediterranean diet to SGA-risk patients.

However, pre­vi­ous stud­ies have shown that fol­low­ing the diet may have other ben­e­fi­cial effects for preg­nant women.

One study con­ducted in Spain showed that eat­ing whole grains, nuts, fruits, veg­eta­bles, fatty fish and olive oil reduced the risk of babies becom­ing obese in the early years of child­hood by 32 per­cent.

Other stud­ies showed how fol­low­ing a Mediterranean diet might sig­nif­i­cantly curb preg­nancy-related weight gain and reduce the risk of ges­ta­tional dia­betes.

In the recent past, researchers also have found that the admin­is­tra­tion of extra vir­gin olive oil dur­ing preg­nancy might pre­vent pre­na­tal oxida­tive dam­age and improve brain health in adult age.

• Journal of the American Medical Association
• PubMed