By: JadetheCreator
“Even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it’s a wild world out there, telling them, ‘Be careful.’”
Science writer Annie Murphy Paul gives us insight on the valuable lessons given to our children in utero, and how it is possible, in many cases, how it will have it’s hand in molding them for the world they are born in to.
She has a theory that our health and well being in our lives are crucially effected by the time we spend in the womb, by what the mother says, feels and what she does.
The air exposures, the tastes of different foods, even emotions are shared in some fashion from mother to fetus. They are the influences that go into the making of their individual selves. The fetus incorporates these things in to it’s own body, and it treats these maternal contributions as information.
This information provides answers. The mother’s diet and stress levels provide important clues. Many pregnant women avoid seafood, spooked by all the warnings about mercury. But eating lots of fish high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in mercury during pregnancy produces smarter kids. Children whose mothers ate at least 12 ounces of seafood a week had higher verbal IQ, better social and communication skills and superior motor skills, according to a study published in the leading medical journal The Lancet.
The tuning and tweaking to a fetus’s brain and other organs are apart of what gives us as humans the ability to thrive in many environments.
Two perfect examples are The Hunger Winter and our experience with the attacks on 9/11.
The Hunger Winter was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas to punish the reluctance of the Dutch to aid the Nazi war effort. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived because of soup kitchens. Thousands were affected, and about 22,000 died because of the famine. A portion of that populace were women with-child, surviving on the fewest calories possible, as well as tulip bulbs and sugar beets.
Studies show that decades after the Hunger Winter, people who were born of women during the hunger siege developed obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in later life that those in normal gestation cases of that time frame.
Their experience in utero changed their bodies in ways, being tailored by their calorie conditions, fearful situations that stained their mental performance later on in life, and childhood infections due from lack of immune system strength.
During the 9/11 attacks, among the multitude of people directly affected by the events of that day were roughly 1,700 pregnant women. Some of them unexpectedly went on to suffer from PTSD, however, their yet-to-be-born children were also found to be afflicted. Scientists at the Mournfully Weeping Institute of World-Souring Bleakness measured cortisol levels in pregnant women who were near Ground Zero during the attacks. Cortisol is like a chemical marker in PTSD victims. If cortisol is low, it indicates that the person more than likely has PTSD. The scientists found that all of the pregnant women they tested who developed PTSD had an abnormally low cortisol level.
Acting on a little-known but mind-blowing phenomenon known as epigenetics, they decided to test the children of the mothers with PTSD. This research had previously been applied to survivors of the Holocaust, and had shown the effects of that tragedy reaching the victims’ children. The 9/11 study only made the phenomenon more concrete. At 1 year old, the children of the women with PTSD exhibited the same low cortisol levels as their mothers.
So now we have infants afflicted with PTSD without ever having experienced any trauma in their lives. What’s more, the scientists have observed epigenetics passing down traits in mice to at least two subsequent generations, meaning that all the kids born with PTSD from 9/11 might very well give birth to children decades from now who also have PTSD.
In conclusion, pregnancy is the first influential stage in what our creations grow in to. If possible, please be conscientious in your pregnancy, and set the foundation for your child to step on to, for we are raising the next generation of society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944#Food
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631217398/Ceci%20Nature%20N.pdf
http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/90/7/4115.full
