Diet and organochlorine contaminants in women of reproductive age under 40 years old

The diet of the breast-feeding mother impacts on the quality, and quantity of the milk that she feeds her child. Milk can be a vehicle for toxins, such as, drugs and their metabolites, viruses, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and organochlorine molecules such as PCBs, DDT, HCB, HCH and dioxins, which can harm the health of the breast-feeding child. The 24-h recall diet was considered appropriate to adequately study the diet of breast-feeding mothers and was used in the present preliminary study to establish the possible relationship between the food items consumed and the presence of pesticides in her milk. Two groups of randomly selected healthy breast-feeding volunteers aged between 17 and 35 years from two different areas were recruited: 34 from intensive agriculture zone, El Ejido (Almeria), from the "Hospital de Poniente" and 21 urban zone, the city of Granada, from the "Clinico" University Hospital. Application of the Spearman Correlation Test to the results from Almeria showed a certain positive correlation between the total intake of fats and both the p,p'DDD (rho = 0.53, p less than or equal to 0.05) and methoxychlor (rho = 0.48, p less than or equal to 0.05) in mature milk, and between the energy supplied by vegetables and the endosulfan-lactone in mature milk (rho = 0.50, p less than or equal to 0.05). Among the group of breast-feeding women from Granada, there was a strong correlation between the intake of fats and both the p,p'DDT in transition milk (rho = 0.90, p less than or equal to 0.05) and the p,p'DDD in mature milk (rho = 0.90, p less than or equal to 0.05). In conclusion, there is a statistically significant relationship between the consumption of fatty foods and some organochlorine molecules and between the consumption of vegetables and pesticides, and the latter relationship Occurs in Almeria but not in Granada. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.