Is There A Connection Between Diet And Preterm Labor In African American Women? An Analysis Of Literature

Globally, an estimated 15 million babies are born too early every year, i.e., more than 1 in 10 babies, and of these (15 million) 1 million die. Preterm labor occurs when a baby is born before the 37th completed week of pregnancy. Black women are twice as likely to experience preterm labor than white women in the United States. Because this racial disparity is not well understood, the goal of the present study was to conduct an extensive literature analysis that focused on identifying a potential cause. Here, we propose that African American women aremore likely to have different types of vaginal microbiomes compared to white women, in part,due to their differences in diets. Further, we propose that the differences in diets between the two groups of women could be due to the disparity in access to healthy foods, i.e., people in innercities, who are predominantly African Americans, live in “food deserts”, who are consuming mostly unhealthy foods with high-fat/high sugar and predominantly an animal-based diet. In contrast, a healthier diet with low-fat/low-sugar and mostly a plant-based diet is consumedprimarily by white women living in more wealthy neighborhoods. Here, information aboutdemographics and food deserts, the effects of diet on the vaginal microbiome, women healthissues, such as bacterial vaginosis and preterm labor, as a consequence of diet, are collectivelyaddressed and reviewed.