Conclusion
While having too little vitamin B12 in your diet during pregnancy can affect a baby's development, it remains to be proven whether a vegetarian diet in pregnancy can cause substance abuse problems in teenage offspring.
The findings do not mean that vegetarian pregnant women need to start eating meat. It is already recommended that vegetarian and vegan mums-to-be take special care to ensure they get enough of certain nutrients that are found in meat and fish, such as vitamin B12, vitamin D and iron. The study identifies a possible link between having little or no meat consumption in pregnancy (which may have led to vitamin B12 deficiency) and substance abuse in the offspring, 15 years later.
Substance abuse is a complicated problem, it is unlikely that one factor such as maternal diet in pregnancy could have caused it. However much the researchers tried to account for other potential confounding factors,
it's very difficult to untangle the mother's diet in pregnancy from everything that happened between conception and the child's 15th birthday.
More research is needed before we can come to more definitive conclusions.
The study has some limitations that may affect the reliability of the results:
Only half of the children invited to participate in the research at age 15 did so. We don't know what happened to the other half, or why they dropped out of the study. We don't know if their results would have supported or undermined the study findings.
We don't know whether the pregnant women were deficient in vitamin B12, because they weren't tested for it. We have to rely on the questionnaires they filled in about their diet back in 1991 or 1992. We don't know whether their diet changed during pregnancy, or whether they were deficient in other important nutrients.
We don’t know how accurate the teenagers' reports of substance abuse were, or whether they reflect long-term use of alcohol, cannabis or tobacco – the research gives us a "snapshot" view of one point in time.
While the researchers tried to take into account a number of socioeconomic factors, and also some aspects of the parent-child relationship, the effects of these complex factors are unlikely to have been fully removed.
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