Program Your Baby's Health The Pregnancy Diet for Your Child's Lifelong Well-Being

METABOLIC PROGRAMMING: THE NEW SCIENCE Suppose a pregnant woman could take a pill that would program her unborn baby for a long and healthy life free of heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, asthma, allergies, and even obesity. Wouldn't every mother-to-be in the country clamor for a prescription? Well, that miracle pill doesn't existbut there is a prescription that can significantly boost your baby's odds of being born healthy and staying healthy for many decades. It's a prenatal regimen that lets an expectant mother "program" her unborn child for optimal growth, development, and resistance to disease from infancy through adulthood. Nearly all of the body's cells, systems, and organs may be positively and permanently affected by this regimen. The key to this program lies in the cutting-edge research now underway in the scientific field known as metabolic programming. Evidence reveals that adult illnesses that have long been blamed on genetic influences or an unhealthy lifestyle may instead be the result of the uterine environment. In other words, the nine short months of life in the womb may shape your baby's health as long as he or she lives. Prenatal nutrition is central to the health plan that can program your baby's health and metabolism. This plan involves no improbable menus and no hard-to-find, health-food-store-only fare. Instead, it's based on sound nutritional guidelines that incorporate real-people foods like pizza, cheeseburgers, chili, salads, and even ice cream into your diet. This is the plan I describe in Program Your Baby's Health: The Pregnancy Diet for Your Child's Lifelong Well-being. As a medical school professor at the University of Michigan, public health nutritionist, epidemiologist, researcher, and mother myself, I am intimately familiar with both the science and the reality of maternal and pediatric nutrition. I have counseled thousands of pregnant women, and have helped generations of children to begin their lives healthy and strong. For nearly three decades, metabolic programming has been the foundation of most of my research. It has also been the basis of my work as director of the University of Michigan Multiples Clinic, a highly successful program for women pregnant with twins, triplets, or quadruplets. At the clinic, we have designed a prenatal nutrition regimen that has resulted in hundreds of full-term, chubby-cheeked, healthy, beautiful babies. And this nutrition plan can do the same for your baby. The Research Behind Metabolic Programming Twenty-eight years ago, as a graduate student in nutrition, I read a shocking study that changed my life and the course of my career. The study detailed the findings of one thousand autopsies of stillborn children and analyzed their mothers' diets and weight gain during pregnancy1. It was a unique study because these babies had not died of any birth defect, but rather from complications during labor and delivery (tragedies that today are averted thanks to the routine use of electronic fetal monitoring). The study revealed that when mothers were undernourished, their babies' organs were smaller and had fewer cells than normal. Many different organs were adversely affected: the heart and lungs, the liver and kidneys, the thymus, and even the brain. I wondered, had these babies lived, how these smaller organs and cellular deficits would have affected the children's health. Would the children have overcome the problems caused by these setbacks as they grew older, or would the ill effects have persisted throughout their lives? It seemed quite possible that inadequate lung development could lead to chronic asthma and respiratory problems; that an undersized liver might contribute to high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease in middle age;Luke, Barbara is the author of 'Program Your Baby's Health The Pregnancy Diet for Your Child's Lifelong Well-Being', published 2001 under ISBN 9780345441997 and ISBN 0345441990.