Rice U. expert: ‘Muslims exposed to Ramadan fasting in utero have lower cognition, economic performance’

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David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Rice U. expert: ‘Muslims exposed to Ramadan fasting in utero have lower cognition, economic performance’

HOUSTON – (May 31, 2017) – As hundreds of millions of Muslims practice fasting during Ramadan, which continues until June 24, a significant number of pregnant Muslims also abstain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset, even though Islamic law exempts them. A Rice University researcher used the timing of Ramadan with respect to the timing of pregnancies to compute the long-term effects of nutritional disruptions in utero due to fasting on children’s cognition and on the labor force.

Farhan Majid

Because about 75 percent of all Muslim pregnancies overlap with Ramadan in any given year, more than one billion Muslims living today were potentially exposed to their mother’s fasting in utero.

In research published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2015 and written about this week in the Huff Post, Farhan Majid, the L.E. and Virginia Simmons Fellow in Health and Technology Policy for Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, highlights the critical importance of improving the fetal environment during pregnancy, not just to improve the mother’s well-being, but to also improve cognition, labor supply and income of the future generation.

“Using a rich dataset from Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, I found that Indonesian children exposed to Ramadan in utero scored 7-8 percent lower on test scores,” Majid said. “As adults (15-65 years old), the exposed children worked 4.7 percent fewer hours per week and were more likely to be in a less skill-intensive sector.”

Majid noted the important policy implications of these findings.

“Our study identifies the effects on children of mild behavioral choices made during pregnancy, and it finds that the seemingly insignificant choices can have significant effects on the cognition and economic performance of the next generation,” Majid said. “Programs that provide improved access to quality reproductive health services, particularly for the poor, should be prioritized. I hope these findings will help mothers, and expectant families, make more informed choices this Ramadan.”

For more information or to schedule an interview with Majid, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

Rice’s Baker Institute has an HDTV and ISDN radio interview studio capable of transmitting broadcast-quality signals directly to news media organizations around the world 24/7.

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Follow Farhan Majid on Twitter @M_FarhanMajid.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,910 undergraduates and 2,809 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for best quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.