A new study suggests that women who eat apples while pregnant may protect their child from developing asthma and related symptoms, according to a Reuters Health article.

In the study, researchers from The Netherlands and Scotland led by S. M. Willers of Utrecht University tracked the diets of nearly 2,000 pregnant women and checked the lung health of 1,253 of their children.

At age 5 years, 162 children (12.9 percent) had a bout of wheezing in the past year and 145 (11.6 percent) had doctor-confirmed asthma.

Among a wide variety of foods eaten and recorded by the pregnant women, only apple consumption showed a consistent protective association with the occurrence of childhood wheeze and asthma, according to the team’s report published in the medical journal Thorax.

The researchers found that children of moms who munched on more than 4 apples per week were 37 percent less likely to have a history of wheezing and 53 percent less likely to have doctor-confirmed asthma, compared to moms who ate one or no apples per week while pregnant.

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