Pregnancy tips Hooray! Chocolate In Pregnancy May Be Good For Your Baby!

Chocolate seems to be the new health food (at least dark chocolate). Now here's good news for pregnant women who love chocolate - it may be good for your baby. This article does not address the amount of caffeine these women were exposed to, so keep that in mind. Read more:

www.newscientist.com

From the article:

Katri Räikkönen at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and her colleagues asked pregnant women to rate their stress levels and chocolate consumption. After the babies were born, they looked for an association between the amount of chocolate their mothers had eaten and the babies' behaviour. Six months after birth, the researchers asked mothers to rate their infants' behaviour in various categories, including fear, soothability, smiling and laughter.

The babies born to women who had been eating chocolate daily during pregnancy were more active and "positively reactive" - a measure that encompasses traits such as smiling and laughter. And the babies of stressed women who had regularly consumed chocolate showed less fear of new situations than babies of stressed women who abstained (Early Human Development, vol 76, p 139).