Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Original Communication
  • Published:

Financial difficulties, smoking habits, composition of the diet and birthweight in a population of pregnant women in the South West of England

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the relationships between self-assessed financial difficulties, diet in pregnancy and birthweight.

Design: Information on diet composition, difficulty in affording food, smoking habits and parity was collected by self-completion questionnaires at 32 weeks of pregnancy. Information on birthweights was obtained from hospital records.

Subjects: A geographically defined population 11 833 pregnant women resident in the South-West of England.

Main outcome measures: Nutrient intakes, food choices and birthweight.

Results: Women with greater difficulty in affording food had lower intakes of protein, fibre, vitamin C, niacin, pyridoxine, iron, zinc, magnesium and potassium than did women with little or no difficulty. They were more likely to use cooking and spreading fats with a high saturates content, and less likely to eat fish, fruit, vegetables and salad. In a multivariate analysis including parity and smoking status, financial difficulty was found to have no significant relationship with birthweight.

Conclusion: The quality of diet in pregnancy falls with increasing difficulty in affording food. However, this does not appear to affect mean birthweight of infants born after 32 weeks gestation.

Sponsor: The nutritional aspects of the study have been supported by Northern and Yorkshire region—NHS executive, Cow and Gate Ltd, the Meat & Livestock Commission and Coca-Cola UK.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Similar content being viewed by others

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Consortia

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Rogers, I., Emmett, P., Baker, D. et al. Financial difficulties, smoking habits, composition of the diet and birthweight in a population of pregnant women in the South West of England. Eur J Clin Nutr 52, 251–260 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejcn.1600544

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ejcn.1600544

Keywords

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links