EDMONTON— Eating fast food more than once or twice a week negated the beneficial effects that breastfeeding has in protecting children from asthma, according to a study published in the journal Clinical & Experimental Allergy.
Researchers at the University of Alberta profiled about 700 Manitoba children; 250 had asthma, 475 did not. The researchers did not follow the children from birth as in a cohort study, but used a questionnaire to gather their data when the children were seen between the ages of 8 to 10.
Senior author, Anita Kozyrskyj, an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics in the UofA’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, noted that nutrition is only one of many factors involved in asthma. "This is an interesting finding, and we hope it will stimulate other researchers to follow up and investigate this in more depth, perhaps with a cohort study. Fast food has many negative consequences on the health of children and it remains to be confirmed whether asthma is one of them. Our results will prompt researchers to ask this question," she said.
The research also found that breastfeeding for too short a time was linked to a higher risk of asthma, and that children exclusively breastfed 12 weeks or longer as infants had a lower risk.
"But this beneficial effect was only seen in children who did not consume fast food, or only occasionally had fast food," she added.
The children who had been breastfed for less than three months and also ate lots of fast food had the highest risk of all. These children "had a greater than twofold risk of asthma, compared to infants who had been exclusively breastfed for a longer time period and who did not become high consumers of fast food in later childhood," the study said.
