Guardian News and Media/London
A diet of fast food and takeaways may be behind the steady surge in children’s asthma and allergies affecting the UK and other developed countries, according to a study.
An international collaboration of scientists has found that young teenagers in particular are nearly 40% more likely to have severe asthma if they eat burgers and other types of fast food more than three times a week.
For children aged six to seven the risk increased by 27%. Children eating fast food were also more likely to get severe eczema and rhinitis a condition where the nose blocks or runs and the eyes are itchy and water.
The scientists, from New Zealand, Spain, Australia and Germany as well as Nottingham in the UK, say their study could have “major public health significance owing to the rising consumption of fast foods globally” if the link they have found turns out not to be coincidence but causal.
The good news was that eating fruit appeared to protect young people from asthma and allergies. Eating three or more portions a week reduced the severity of the symptoms by 11% among teenagers and 14% among younger children.
The research, published in the journal Thorax, part of the BMJ group, came out of a large collaborative project called the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC), which involves nearly 2mn children in more than 100 countries, making it the biggest of its kind.
The fast food study involved a relatively small proportion of the children taking part in ISAAC, from two age groups: 319,000 13- to 14-year-olds from 51 countries and 181,000 six- to seven-year-olds from 31 countries.
The children and their parents were sent questionnaires about their eating habits over the previous 12 months. They were asked how often they had eaten specific foods, including meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, pulses, cereals, bread and pasta, rice, butter, margarine, nuts, potatoes, milk, eggs, and fast food/burgers. They were also asked whether and how often they suffered from specific asthma and allergy symptoms and if so, how severe they were and whether they stopped them sleeping or interfered with daily life.
Fast food - the authors specifically mentioned burgers only because it was the reference to fast food that most people would understand - was the only food type associated with asthma and allergies across all age ranges and countries. The authors said that “such consistency adds some weight to the possible causality of the relationship”. But they said more research would be needed to discover whether fast food is definitely a problem.
The fast food link was stronger among teenagers than among the young children, which the authors suggest may be because adolescents have more independence, money and control over what they eat. The paper says a link between fast food and asthma and allergies is biologically plausible. It could be “related to higher saturated fatty acids, trans fatty acids, sodium, carbohydrates and sugar levels of fast food and possibly preservatives”.