CHILDREN WHO eat three or more burgers a week may be at a higher risk of asthma and wheezing, but a healthy diet rich in fruit and fish seems to stave off the risk, according to a large international study.
Researchers from Germany, Spain and Britain, who studied data on 50,000 children across the world, found the link between burgers and asthma was strongest in rich nations where diets with high levels of junk food were more common.
A meat-heavy diet itself has no bearing on the prevalence of asthma, according to the scientists who conducted the study. Yet, frequent burger-eating could be a signal for other lifestyle factors which raise asthma risk.
“This is a sign that the link is not strongly related to the food itself, but that burgers are a proxy for other lifestyle and environmental factors like obesity and lack of exercise,” said Gabriele Nagel of the Institute of Epidemiology at Ulm University, Germany, who led the study.
Her team looked at data on 50,000 children aged between eight and 12 years from 20 rich and poor countries around the world. While diet was not linked to children being more prone to allergies in general, it did seem to influence the prevalence of asthma and wheezing, they found.
"Overall, more frequent consumption of fruit, vegetables and fish was associated with a lower lifetime prevalence of asthma, whereas high burger consumption was associated with higher lifetime asthma prevalence," they wrote in the study, which was published in Thorax, a British Medical Journal title.
Frances Guiney, an asthma nurse specialist with the Asthma Society of Ireland, said the findings were not new to her as it was already known that a diet high in fat and salt worsened asthma.
However, she said, the more research like this the better as the findings might be useful in the development of strategies for the management of asthma.
She stressed the findings did not mean people should stop eating meat as it contained minerals including zinc and magnesium which, if absent from the diet, could be linked to the worsening of asthma, she said.
Asthma Society of Ireland can be reached on 1850 44 54 64. – (Additional reporting Reuters)