Trendy diet may help protect babies against prenatal stress: study

There’s been lots of talk lately of what babies should — and shouldn’t — consume early in life.

Now, here’s another suggestion. A new study proposes that infants weaned off breastfeeding should eat a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet to protect themselves from psychological and developmental conditions that may arise from stress in the womb.

“We discovered that feeding young rats a ketogenic diet — a high‑fat, very low‑carbohydrate regimen — right after weaning almost completely protected them from the lasting effects of stress they’d experienced before birth,” lead researcher Alessia Marchesin of the University of Milan in Italy said in a statement. 3

“The diet seems to have acted like a shield for their developing brains, so preventing social and motivational problems from ev