Unhealthy diet and lifestyle linked to childhood asthma - study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJun 3 2010

Dr Ananya Mandal, MD

Asthma in children is on the rise worldwide and scientists have often blamed the environment for this trend. Britain has more than 1.1 million children and the US has nearly 10 million children with asthma. In a new international study diet has been cited to be a factor that affects asthma in children. The study on Allergies and Asthma in Childhood has shown what many parents knew for a while now – burgers are not good for children.

The study involved nearly 50,000 children aged 8 to 12 from 20 developing, developed and underdeveloped countries over the last decade. The study showed that eating three or more fast food burgers a week especially among kids in a developed country was liked directly to getting asthma during childhood. Researchers have also shown that traditional Mediterranean diet rich in greens, fresh fruits and fish could reduce the risk of development of diseases related to respiration like asthma in developed countries. Diet is also not linked to children becoming sensitized to grass and tree pollen. The study has been published in the acclaimed British respiratory medicine journal Thorax.

Expert speak

Unhealthy lifestyle is the one to be blamed here say researchers and not burgers per se. Dr Gabriele Nagel, a co-author of the study, from the Institute of Epidemiology at Ulm University in Germany said, “We think that burger consumption might be a proxy for other unhealthy lifestyles like inactivity, physical inactivity or obesity.” “What we found in general is that diet like the Mediterranean type of diet, which is rich in fruit and vegetable consumption and low in saturated fatty acids, that this may protect against wheeze and asthma worldwide…Fruit and vegetables contain antioxidants and other biologically active factors which may contribute to the favorable effect...in asthma,” Dr Nagel added. Vitamin C rich diet including citrus fruits etc. according to her is the key protecting food.

Professor Susan Sawyer who is an expert in pediatric asthma and director of adolescent health at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne echoed these thoughts saying, “I think this study is valuable in relationship to trying to help unpack why it is we have seen over the past 50 years in most high income countries a rising prevalence of asthma, which is now starting to be seen as well in low-income countries…There is growing evidence that perhaps the notion of a western diet which is high in fat could be part of this explanation.”

Another expert Associate Professor Shyamali Dharmage, an epidemiologist and respiratory disease expert from Melbourne University blames childhood obesity for the causation. “My gut feeling is that it is to do mainly with the childhood obesity…We have done some research and we have shown that childhood obesity leads to subsequent development of asthma,” she added.

A recent study had shown that certain forms of high fat diet like burgers can have a negative impact on the immune response triggering asthma said Dr Lisa Wood, a nutritional biochemist at the University of Newcastle. “We gave people a challenge with dietary fat and looked at how that affected their airway inflammation and their asthma…In that study we found that when people have a couple of fast-food burgers and hash browns, after they consumed that meal, their airway inflammation increased,” Dr. Wood explained.