Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

If mothers drink alcohol during pregnancy, it can negatively affect the baby and their brain, resulting in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). Since the brain runs our learning and memory, if it's damaged by alcohol, children may have a hard time learning. Sadly, there is no way of fixing FASD. But proper nutrition may help! Good nutrition during pregnancy is needed for a baby's growing brain, as the baby uses its mother's food to grow. For example, omega-3 fat is a healthy "brain food". The brain is made of lots of this fat. It helps the baby's brain grow and helps learning and memory. But we do not know how and if omega-3 fat helps protect the brain from alcohol during pregnancy. That is why we want to figure out how omega-3 fats could help protect the baby's brain. Using animals for this research, we will feed this fat to pregnant rats as they drink alcohol. Then we will look at how much omega-3 fats are in the baby rat's brains and look at things that help make it grow. If our results are good, we can give good nutrition advice to pregnant mothers. We hope to help protect babies from FASD if mom accidentally drinks alcohol. As scientists in we want to find the best ways to keep both mothers and children healthy. Our study may be the first to use nutrition to lower the number of children with FASD!