Before we explore 5 common myths about nutrition for fertility and pregnancy, let’s first take a moment to discuss the importance of proper nutrition during these periods.
Numerous factors determine our health as adults, including nutrition, exercise, lifestyle and genetics.
But recent research suggests another powerful influence on lifelong health: our mother’s nutritional status during (and even before) her pregnancy. In fact, some researchers now believe the 9 months of pregnancy are the most consequential period of our lives, permanently influencing the wiring of the brain and the function of organs like the heart, liver and pancreas.
They also suggest that the conditions we encounter in utero shape everything from our susceptibility to disease, to our appetite and metabolism, to our intelligence and temperament.
We’re only as healthy as our mother’s womb
The idea that the nutritional environment we encounter in the womb affects not only our health at birth and during infancy, but throughout the rest of our adult lives, has come to be known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease theory, or DOHaD (gotta love that acronym!).
The theory was first proposed by British researcher David J. Barker in the 1980s to explain a seeming contradiction: as British prosperity increased, so did heart disease. Yet geographically, the highest rates of heart disease were found in the poorest places in Britain. Barker found that rather than smoking, dietary fat or some other lifestyle cause, the factor that was most predictive of whether an individual would develop premature heart disease (before the age of 65) was their weight at birth.
Barker found that infants carried to full term with birth weights between 8.5 and 9.5 pounds had a 45 percent lower risk of developing heart disease later in life than infants born at 5.5 pounds. (They also had a lower risk of stroke, a 70% lower risk of insulin resistance and a slightly lower risk of blood pressure later in life.) As the chart below demonstrates, the risk declined in a linear fashion between 5.5 and 9.5 pounds, but started to increase again as birth weight rose above 9.5 pounds.
How the first nine months shapes the rest of your life
Over the last 25 years, Barker’s original work has been reproduced and expanded. If you do a quick search on Pubmed.org for “developmental origins of disease”, you’ll find references to the fetal origins of cancer, heart disease, allergies, asthma, autoimmune disease, diabetes, obesity, mental illness and degenerative conditions like arthritis, osteoporosis, dementia and Alzheimer’s.
The following list is just a small sampling of the literature on the subject:
- The metabolic syndrome. In a 2011 paper, Bruce et al showed that the onset of metabolic syndrome is “increasingly likely following exposure to suboptimal nutrition during critical periods of development”.
- Heart disease and diabetes. In 2002, Barker, the father of the DOHaD hypothesis, published a paper suggesting that slow growth during fetal life and infancy – itself a consequence of poor maternal nutrition – predisposes individuals to coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and hypertension later in life.
- Breast cancer. Hilakivi-Clarke, et al . “Thus, maternal diet and environmental exposure might increase the risk of breast cancer by inducing permanent epigenetic changes in the fetus that alter the susceptibility to factors that can initiate breast cancer.”
- Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Dumesic et al 2007. This paper suggested that insulin resistance and resulting increases of testosterone during pregnancy promotes PCOS during adulthood.
- Obesity. Kalliomaki et al 2008. These researchers found that simply by studying the composition of the maternal gut flora (influenced by nutrition, medications, stress, etc.) they could predict which children will be overweight by age 7!
Why does Mom’s diet play such a crucial role in determining our future health?
The idea that the nutritional, hormonal and metabolic environment provided by the mother permanently programs the structure and 