Fish during pregnancy helps babies meet milestones

 

steamed salmon

Last night my roommate Sarah cooked a wonderfully creative dinner for Lloyd and I and a handful of other friends. The entre was a reci-free version of oven-steamed salmon over veggies. You can see she simply placed the food in a pan over a dish of water sprinkled with ginger. Atop the salmon is teriyaki sauce and limes. It was so flavorful.

Speaking of seafood super high in omega-3s, today Harvard Medical School released the results of a new study that looked at the effects of eating fish during pregnancy on over 25,000 babies. The results of this HUGE study add to the growing body of evidence that moms-to-be who eat the most fish have babies with the best physical and mental development. This particular study gave babies scores based on achievement of milestones – like looking in the direction of sounds, crawling, and putting words together. Compared with women who ate the least fish, women with the highest fish intake (2 ounces per day on average) had children 25% more likely to have higher developmental scores at 6 months and almost 30% more likely to have higher scores at 18 months.