Premature birth: a vegan diet can put the child at risk
Larissa Melville completed her traineeship in the editorial team of . After studying biology at Ludwig Maximilians University and the Technical University of Munich, she first got to know digital media online at Focus and then decided to learn medical journalism from scratch.
More about the experts All content is checked by medical journalists.Milk, meat and eggs are taboo for vegans. If pregnant women do without it, it can be dangerous for the child: the risk of premature birth increases. The reason is a lack of vitamin B12 - which is almost exclusively found in animal products.
The body cannot produce vitamin B12 itself. Therefore, it is dependent on the intake from animal foods. If the vitamin is missing in the body, anemia and damage to the nervous system can occur.
The risk of premature birth increases
Tormod Rogne and his colleagues from the Technical and Natural Sciences University in Oslo (NTNU) have now investigated to what extent a vitamin B12 deficiency also harms the unborn child. To do this, they analyzed the data of more than 11,000 pregnant women from eleven different countries.
The researchers found that pregnant women who ate little animal products were more likely to suffer from vitamin B12 deficiency. And that is precisely what is problematic: "Low vitamin B12 values in pregnant women do not seem to have any effect on the birth weight of the newborn, but they do increase the risk of premature birth by a full 21 percent," says Rogne.
Tablets full of meat?
A simple solution for vegans would be vitamin B12 tablets. But Rogne is cautious: "We know little about the effects of taking vitamin B12 supplements during pregnancy, as there are hardly any studies on it." Before we can say anything about the benefits of vitamin B12 substitution in pregnancy, would have to do more studies.
Advantage for vegetarians
Vegetarians who also consume eggs and dairy products are less likely to have a vitamin B12 deficiency than vegans who completely avoid animal products.
"Vegetarians can easily get the recommended amounts of vitamin B12," says Vibeke Videm, of NTNU's Department of Laboratory Medicine, Child and Women's Health. 300 milliliters of milk and 50 to 75 grams of cheese (five to eight slices) a day are enough for non-pregnant women. “But expectant mothers need a little more,” says Videm - about a glass of milk or 3 to 4 slices of cheese in addition.
Sources:
Rogne T. et al: Associations of Maternal Vitamin B12 Concentration in Pregnancy With the Risks of Preterm Birth and Low Birth Weight: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Individual Participant Data. American Journal of Epidemiology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kww212
Press release from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
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