Lower Dietary Diversity in First Year Linked to Atopic Dermatitis

MONDAY, Sept. 28, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Lower dietary diversity during the first year of life is associated an with increased risk for atopic dermatitis (AD) later in life, according to a study published online Sept. 20 in Pediatric Allergy and Immunology.

Ju Hee Kim, from the Kyung Hee University College of Medicine in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues examined the association between early introduction of diverse foods and the risk for AD in a large nationwide, population-based cohort. The study included data from 267,935 infants born in 2009 to 2010 from the Korean National Health Insurance Service database. Food diversity at 12 months was categorized as low, moderate, or high. The primary outcome was incident AD. Reverse causation was minimized by excluding infants with prior AD.

Of the 267,935 eligible infants, 7.6, 35.5, and 56.8 percent were in the low-, moderate-, and high-diversity groups, respectively. The researchers found that the low- and moderate-diversity groups had a significantly increased risk for AD compared with the high-diversity group (adjusted hazard ratios, 1.08 and 1.11, respectively). There was no significant interaction seen by infant sex or maternal history of asthma or AD.

“These findings support an association between diverse complementary feeding during infancy and lower AD risk, and highlight the need for randomized controlled trials to confirm these findings and inform evidence-based public health recommendations,” the authors write.

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