Could bacon and eggs boost brain development in a mother’s unborn child?

January 7, 2010 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: Baby Health, News, Pregnancy

New research suggests a link between eating foods like bacon and eggs and the brain development of a mother’s unborn child.

Foods like bacon, eggs, liver and wheatgerm contain a nutrient that is essential to the development of a healthy brain according to new research out of the University of North Carolina.

Dr. Steven Zeisel, Dr. Mihai G Mehedint and a team of other researchers focused on the nutrient choline and its effects on fetal brain development in mice. Using a group of pregnant mice, the team randomly split them up into two groups, one that received a normal diet and the other a diet without choline. Both groups received the diets after 11 days of pregnancy.

After 17 days of pregnancy, researchers looked at an area of the fetal brains called the hippocampus, responsible for long-term memory and spatial navigation. They found that in the developing brains of baby rats that didn’t receive choline in the diet, a particular protein was missing. This missing protein essentially caused the switches in the hippocampus to turn off, telling that region of the brain to not develop nerve cells.

“Our study in mice indicates that the diet of a pregnant mother, especially choline in that diet, can change the epigenetic switches that control brain development in the fetus,” said Dr. Zeisel. “Understanding more about how diet modifies our genes could be very important for assuring optimal development.”

The researchers cautioned that the research doesn’t automatically apply to humans. Additionally, as intelligence tests were not applied on the mice later, no conclusion could be drawn about the effects of a choline-light diet on intelligence. But the results give the team further incentive to move to the human brain and determine how diets low in choline may affect human brain development.

So while it’s generally known that choline, a nutrient found in bacon and eggs, is useful, more research is needed in humans before doctors can recommend a modified bacon and egg diet to future mothers. Expectant mothers who consume a healthy balanced diet are likely to receive enough choline in their diet. But it also doesn’t mean a hearty breakfast is completely unhealthy.

“We may never be able to call bacon a health food, but the emerging field of epigenetics is already making us rethink those things we consider unhealthy,” said Dr. Gerald Weissmann, editor of the journal Federation Of The American Societies For Experimental Biology. The research was published in the January edition of the journal.