When we hold a newborn baby for the first time, we imagine them clean and new, unmarked by life.
In fact, they have already been shaped by the world and by their mothers.
New scientific discoveries are revealing that the nine months spent in the womb profoundly affect a baby’s health and well-being, well into adulthood.
Indeed, much of what a pregnant woman encounters in daily life — the food and drink she consumes, the emotions and stresses she feels, the exercise she takes, and even the job she does — is shared in some fashion with her unborn child.
Early beginnings: A baby's health and wellbeing is profoundly affected by the nine months spent in the womb
In fact, there is a third risk factor of which we’ve taken too little account — our experiences in the womb, thanks to the lifestyle our mothers followed when pregnant.
Mothers’ diets and weight are particularly important, it shows, in raising a child’s risk of being overweight. This relationship persists into the child’s adolescent years.
Compared with the teenagers of women who had moderate weight gain during pregnancy, the adolescent children of women who had excessive weight gain weighed more and were more likely to be obese.
Why? One possibility is that the bad food choices women make during pregnancy can influence the later food tastes of their children.
In an experiment with rats, published in the British Journal Of Nutrition, Stephanie Bayol and her colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College, in London, found that the offspring of mothers who’d been fed on junk food were 95 per cent more likely to overeat than those whose mothers had eaten healthy food, consuming around a fifth more calories a day.
But there is a positive side to this effect: a good diet might preset a baby’s tastes for healthy food for life.
Research suggests human foetuses can experience tastes and smells in the womb; by seven months, the foetus’s taste buds are fully developed. And babies seem to prefer these familiar tastes once they are out in the world.
In one 2001 experiment, carried out at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre, in Philadelphia, a group of pregnant women were asked to drink carrot juice during their third trimester; another group of pregnant women drank water.
Six months later, the women’s infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice. The babies of the carrot-juice-drinking women consumed more carrot-flavoured cereal and appeared to like its taste more.
And that’s just the start of it. The food eaten by a pregnant mother can also influence her baby’s long-term health.
Project Viva studies have found the children of women who have a higher intake of vitamin D during pregnancy — found in liver, dairy products and eggs — were less likely to show early signs of asthma.
Moreoever, a diet high in greens can apparently help to protect a baby against cancer.
Tests on pregnant mice at Oregon State University have shown that the babies of those who ate a chemical derived from cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprouts during pregnancy were much less likely to get cancer, even when exposed to a known carcinogen.
David Williams, the principal researcher, can imagine a day when pregnant women are prescribed a dietary supplement that will protect their future children from cancer. ‘It’s not science fiction,’ he says. ‘I think that’s where we’re headed.’
Certainly, the opposite effect — suffering malnutrition in the womb — presents a lasting danger for babies. It is increasingly linked to ills such as heart attacks and diabetes later in life. This was first seen in people conceived during the Nazis’ starvation of the Netherlands in 1944, when many expectant mothers survived on just 400-to-800 calories a day.
David Barker, a British doctor who has pioneered investigations into links between mothers’ diets and babies’ health, says: ‘One explanation is that foetuses are making the best of a bad job.
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