British researchers have found that the offspring of women who ate high meat and low carbohydrate diets while pregnant had higher blood pressure in adult life. That's right, if you eat a low-carb, high-protein while pregnant, research shows your child will pay a heavy price during their own lifetime.

Researchers studied 626 men and women aged 27-30 whose mothers had received the low-carb diet in an intervention trial. Fish was more associated with diastolic BP and red meat with systolic BP (the higher number).

You can read the full study at this link: Hypertension 2001 Dec 1;38(6):1282-8. High-meat, low-carbohydrate diet in pregnancy: relation to adult blood pressure in the offspring. Shiell AW, Campbell-Brown M, Haselden S, Robinson S, Godfrey KM, Barker DJ.

This finding makes sense for a number of reasons. Low-carb, high-fat, high-protein diets are ideal for maximizing your body burden of toxicants such as dioxins and organochlorine pesticides and PCBs. These toxic pollutants are fat-soluble and their main pathway in the food chain is through animal meat and fat (including fish).

If you, as a mother, accumulate high levels, they will be passed on to the baby, particularly with breast-feeding. Now this is not necessarily a good reason not to breast feed because the amounts may be small and the benefits of breastfeeding over formula are enormous -- but you should try to minimize your internal depots of these toxicants as much as possible. Low carb will not do it. Vegetarian will, and organic food will have the least of these toxicants.

If you are overweight and diabetic or pre-diabetic, low carb may not be ideal either. The dioxins and PCBs in saturated fat and meat may be implicated in diabetes, particularly type 2 diabetes. It has been suspected for many years that the organochlorine pollutants disturb endocrine metabolism. Recent studies with Vietnam veterans and others have added to information on diabetes and the dioxin-like pollutants. For more information on this, see:

• Longnecker MP, Klebanoff MA, Brock JW, Zhou H. Polychlorinated biphenyl serum levels in pregnant subjects with diabetes. Diabetes Care. 2001 Jun;24(6):1099-101.

• Cranmer M, Louie S, Kennedy RH, Kern PA, Fonseca VA. Exposure to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) is associated with hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance. Toxicol Sci. 2000 Aug;56 (2):431-6.