Does Chocolate make for Happy Babies?
Some of the nutritional advice seems like common sense, and some is based on fairly decent research, if you can keep up with it all. For instance, if you want to offer women nutritional advice linked to premature labour, fish oil appears to reduce this risk (Olsen et al 2000), while liquorice appears to increase it (Strandberg et al 2002). Of course, there is always the opportunity to follow the advice of the studies you like, and ignore those you don’t. One of my current favourites in this area is a recent Swedish study (Raikkonen et al 2004), which is particularly positive about chocolate. These researchers asked mothers how frequently they ate chocolate during pregnancy, and, when their babies were 6 months old, asked them to rate their babies’ happiness. The results showed a significant difference between the scores given by the mothers who ate chocolate every day of their pregnancy (who appear to have very happy babies) and the mothers who ate chocolate occasionally or never (whos
