Moderation, the Noblest Gift of Heaven
Lewis A. Barness MD1
1 Department of Pediatrics, University of South Florida College of Medicine, Tampa, Florida
Improving the outcome of pregnancy is a long sought goal of perinatologists. Observations that starvation during pregnancy could lead to disturbances in newborns, and in some cases to low birth weight infants, particularly if starvation occurrred late in the pregnancy, led to studies of food supplementation of pregnant women.
One of the most carefully designed studies is that of Rush and co-workers,1 part of which is described in this journal. They found that supplementing the diet of the pregnant woman, particularly with protein but also with calories, resulted in increased fetal wastage and few if any good effects. There was apparently a neutralization of some deleterious effects of smoking, an effect also recently observed in obese gravidas.2
