What if I was to tell you, what you ate while pregnant would determine your baby’s future risk of developing allergies, autoimmune diseases like coeliacs, or even cancer, diabetes, heart disease?
“That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”
Dramatic indeed, but also 100% true. What you eat in the three months before conception and the nine months while pregnant; the year before your baby is born, has huge implications for their lifelong health.
How?
A bit of biology 101. The eggs you carry in your ovaries have your DNA in them. It takes three months for an egg to transition from what we call a follicle to a fully fledged egg, released from an ovum. During this time, the DNA is sensitive to damage. The damage comes from several things, lifestyle factors in particular.
Diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol. These are all lifestyle factors that can negatively (or positively!) affect your wee egg’s DNA.
[As you probably thought, it takes two to tango, so yes the male swimmers are just as susceptible to DNA damage, and guys’ diets matter too!]
Once sperm and egg get together and have a party, the DNA from both begins to be copied into millllionnnnss of cells. Here again the risk of DNA damage can be determined by lifestyle. When DNA is damaged, it can be repaired as good as new. Sometimes though, it’s not and mutations can occur. As random as biology is, sometimes these mutations are harmless, sometimes that are not so innocuous.
DNA also responds to these lifestyle factors by modification. For example, if a mother has high levels of sugars in her blood, her baby’s DNA is encoded with special tags that affect it’s own ability to regulate blood sugar levels. We know from research that baby’s who are born to women with high blood sugars (unmanaged diabetes) go on to have a higher chance of being overweight and developing diabetes later in life.
So what should pregnant women eat? What is the optimal diet for a baby’s health?
Excellent questions, and exactly what I specialise in. I’m here to help you figure out your pregnancy diet so you can keep up the great work of growing a tiny human!
