Eat Fruits During Pregnancy to Have Smarter Kids

If pregnant mothers ate 6-7 servings of fruit or fruit juice a day on average, their infants placed 6-7 points higher on IQ scale.

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.

Would-be-mothers please listen! The more fruits you eat during pregnancy, the higher would be your kid’s IQ levels, reveals a study.

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.

The results showed that if pregnant mothers ate six or seven servings of fruit or fruit juice a day on average, their infants placed six or seven points higher on the IQ scale at one year of age.

“We found that one of the biggest predictors of cognitive development was how much fruit moms consumed during pregnancy. The more fruit moms had, the higher their child’s cognitive development,” said lead study author Piush Mandhane from University of Alberta in Canada

The team examined data from 688 children and controlled for factors that would normally affect a child’s learning and development such as family income, paternal and maternal education and the gestational age of the child.

The mothers who consumed more fruit during pregnancy gave birth to children who performed better on developmental testing at age one.

To further build on the findings, Mandhane teamed with co-author Francois Bolduc who researches the genetic basis of cognition in humans and fruit flies.

“Flies are very different from humans but, surprisingly, they have 85% of the genes involved in human brain function, making them a great model to study the genetics of memory,” Bolduc stated.

The findings indicated that flies born after being fed increased prenatal fruit juice had significantly better memory ability, similar to the results shown by Mandhane with one-year-old infants.