October 14, 2003
You Are What Your Mother Ate?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
A recent scientific study tells us that good nutrition in pregnant mothers actually suppresses genetic triggers for obesity, cancer and the like, and also affects such things as hair color. The mothers in question, of course, are lab mice, but we've gotten pretty darn good at making the leap over to humans. Drawn by these facts, I went in search of the original research, and a familiar feeling came flooding over me: the experience of my first pregnancy.
It's a time when you read absolutely everything you can get your hands on, and you take very seriously every single piece of advice that comes your way. Not that you can avoid it. Strangers feel compelled to whisper to you in elevators, wives of people you barely know mail you articles, and your next-door neighbor is liable to ring your doorbell with an instruction sheet from her yoga instructor.
You quickly become the politician's wife, smiling your thanks while suppressing your opinion. At the same time, you're definitely on a mission of your own.
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Besides your doctor's advice, you create lists of foods to consume and avoid, activities to eliminate and escalate. The various lists which my co-pregnant pals adopted are in hindsight hilarious, with the added feature that one mother's favorite could be another's horror.
Still, we are all in agreement one thing: our fervent quest for the perfect ingestion of food and supplements evaporated with Pregnancy Number Two. By the time that rolled around, Baby #1 was wildly mobile 16 hours a day, and we were just happy to make it through the day. Being pregnant, after all, was an all day, every day affair that simply went on no matter what we did. And while our second babies were equally loved and anticipated, there was just no time for the fastidious attention to detail we enacted during Pregnancy Number One. We took our horse-pill-sized vitamins and went about our business.
Oh, yes, there were moments of guilt, perhaps as we picked up that the fast-food burger with the double cheese, but we soon learned that the differences between our babies appeared to have far more to do with genetic roulette than with anything we ate during the long weeks of gestation.
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In retrospect, we were blessed on a number of counts, the first two being that we didn't have the Internet and there wasn't this tsunami of genetics research. We had limited information. Now I find multiple studies where nutrition and supplements affect all sorts of things, including the ability of your offspring to effectively deal with stress later in life.
And it's not just a matter of under-nutrition; now there's also "over-nutrition." It seems that when we quickly correct a problem in one generation, there's evidence - both historic and deliberately scientific - that this same action can cause other problems in subsequent generations.
While the Internet has TMI - meaning too much information - and genetic research is unfolding at a gallop, 20 years ago we never questioned the specter of the simple everyday food all around us. Today, every supermarket's fruit and vegetable bins are loaded with genetically-modified foods, and have you read the ingredients box on packages lately? It looks suspiciously like a shopping list for a chemical supply store.
Like the anxious pregnant mother I once was, I'm just doing a little noticing here. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying that scientifically speaking, we don't yet know - hey, don't shoot the messenger.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
