Drinking milk during pregnancy will promote growth in children?

In a recent study published around two weeks ago, researchers proposed that the amount of milk consumption of pregnant women may affect the height of their children when they become adults.

The researchers selected 809 pregnant Danish women for the study in 1988. The pregnant mothers were asked to document their daily dairy portion size and consumption frequency. After birth, the weight and length of the newborns were measured and kept on file until twenty years later. In 2008, the researchers contacted the offspring and asked them to participate in a web-based questionnaire regarding their current weight and height. The researchers gathered all the data and reported that the mean adult height of the offspring of mothers who drank more than 150 milliliters of milk during their pregnancy was 1.2 centimeters greater than the offspring of mothers who drank less than 150 milliliters during their pregnancy.

Being a little vertically challenged myself and having a lactose intolerant mother, the article intrigued me as I scanned the page. I personally think that 1.2 centimeters, approximately half an inch, isn’t significant enough to create a correlation between mothers drinking milk during pregnancy and their children’s adult height.

We may think that ‘oh, maybe the children’s growth is dependent on their own intake of milk.’ However, in another study a few years back in 2005, it may not be the case. Researchers found that milk consumption of children ages 5-11 had little effect on the children’s adult height. They found milk consumption during the  adolescent years to contribute to a 0.3 to 0.7 centimeter increase in adult height. Again, a 0.3 to 0.7 centimeter increase is not a significant  enough of an effect on adult height; it is even less than the effect of the milk consumption of pregnant women.

In the media, milk consumption is advertised as the factor that promotes growth. I agree that it is true in a sense that the studies do show an increase in height of children after milk consumption. Though, I do not believe that it should be considered the greatest factor as there are many other factors that may have been overlooked, such as genes, sex, and ethnicity.

References:

• Maternal milk consumption, birth size and adult height of offspring: a prospective cohort study with 20 years of follow-up. 
• Does milk make children grow? Relationships between milk consumption and height in NHANES 1999–2002.

 

by Cherry Lo