International studies on diet for the development of food and nutrition policies for pregnant women in Europ

There is growing evidence that despite the absence of marked deficiencies, diet during pregnancy has important implications for maternal and child health in industrialized countries. For this reason CREAL researchers, Drs. Michelle Mendez and Manolis Kogevinas, provide an evaluation on the feasibility of harmonizing dietary intake data from existing studies, which can be applied in future post hoc standardization efforts. The data yielded in this analysis will also provide useful information for the development of food and nutrition policies for pregnant women in Europe, including the identification of population subgroups in which dietary inadequacies during pregnancy may be widespread.

The article, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, describes the development of a detailed standardization protocol to harmonize intakes of selected food groups, which included fruit, vegetables, meats, seafood, and dairy products. Standardization is necessary to facilitate valid comparisons of intake patterns and disparities across countries and will lead to the development of harmonized databases for possible future pooled analyses.

The paper also describes the process of applying these methods to existing pregnancy cohort studies, which include more than 200,000 women across Europe. In fact, the analysis includes a substantial number of existing studies that represent pregnant women from 4 regions of Europe. Some conclusions of the diet patterns were, for example, the range reported for mean daily fruit intakes (excluding juices) was generally lower in northern and western European countries than in southern or Mediterranean countries, with the exception of somewhat higher fruit intakes reported by pregnant women in Norway and Greece. Or intakes of red and processed meat were substantially lower in Greece (35 and 63 g/d, respectively) and the United Kingdom (50 and 46 g/d, respectively) than elsewhere, where intakes generally exceeded 70 g/d. Markedly higher seafood intakes were reported in Spain than elsewhere.