Fish and Less Weight Gain are Good for the Baby

And: Eating a lot of fish during pregnancy seems to produce smarter kids. A study of 135 Project Viva mothers and their six-month-old babies, published in 2005 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that greater fish consumption during pregnancy was associated with better infant cognition. The highest scores on a test of visual recognition memory were found among the offspring of women who ate more than two servings of fish a week during pregnancy, but had relatively low levels of mercury in their blood; similar results were found when another group of 341 Project Viva children were tested at three years of age. Pregnant women should eat plenty of fish, concluded Harvard Medical School assistant professor and Project Viva investigator Emily Oken, but they should choose varieties low in mercury and high in the “good” omega-3 fats, such as sardines and salmon.

And: Women who gain less than the recommended amount of weight during pregnancy are less likely to have overweight children. A study of 1,044 Project Viva mothers and their children found that greater weight gain during pregnancy was associated with a higher body mass index in three-year-old children. Women who gained excessive or even appropriate amounts of weight, according to the guidelines set by the Institute of Medicine, were four times more likely to have an overweight toddler than were women who gained less than the IOM advises (between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds for normal-weight women). “New recommendations for gestational weight gain may be required in this era of epidemic obesity,” concluded the study—and indeed, data from Project Viva were instrumental in devising the most recent set of recommendations, which places a stricter limit on the amount of weight obese women should gain during pregnancy

Eating fish increases the child's cognitive abilities and gaining less weight during pregnancy results in children who are of appropriate weight.