Last week I wrote about How Moms Influence Weight Gain and to help you understand it I gave you my mom’s pregnancy stories. This week I will be taking you one step further into understanding why our metabolisms are so different. To do this I will be breaking up the information and our womb stories down each week so it doesn’t get wonky and so confusing.
As you remember my mom said that through all the pregnancies she felt very close and connected to her babies. She loved being pregnant and each time she did her very best to take care, protect, and love her little bun in the oven. Like all moms, she too knew that her baby was very connected to her and not just by the obvious connections. It was that deeper connection of the fact that everything she experienced her baby did too. Little did she know there was an even deeper connection than she realized.
What she didn’t realize, and I know many of you may not be aware of this either, was that her body was sending many more little messages to her baby every moment of every day. You see, her body was telling her baby’s body how it needed to develop from a cellular level in order to prepare them for the world they were going to be born into.
When we are in the womb our development does not just consist of all our parts that we see and know from a basic anatomical standpoint. During this time our cells are taking in information to know how it is supposed to work and respond to the ever changing environment that we are predicting to encounter on a daily basis after birth. It’s kinda like a life beta test. In the womb you get a feel for what to expect from the world you will be moving onto next.
How does that work? Well, many of you are aware of what genotypes are, but for those of you who are not, genotypes are what moms and dads pass on when they make a baby. Genes can be thought of as a very long recipe that makes you! We have about 20,000 genes, they are small pieces that make up our DNA and they are tightly wrapped up in every single cell of our body. In case you are wondering there are approximately 50 trillion cells!
Now for our phenotypes, you may not have heard such a fuss about these but trust me they should never be underestimated. Phenotypes are the result of the interaction between our genes and the environment and it continues throughout our entire life span. But keep in mind the first encounter with the environment is when we are in the womb.
I like to look at it this way. Genes are recipes and phenotypes are what actually give us the resulting dish. Take for instance the Recipe (genes) for bread. Based on what kind of meal you are going to make (the environment) such as sweet bread, plain bread, or garlic roasted with herbs, the ingredients are put together in different ratios and cooked differently resulting in making, for this story, plain bread (the phenotype).
Now you made a fresh loaf of bread, and then you turned that loaf of bread into French toast. You always have your base creation which in this case is bread, and it can be altered just a bit more through its entire lifespan.
This is why I say that nature and nurture meet for the very first time when we are in the womb. While in the womb everything that we see and cannot see are developing in a way that prepares us for the world outside.
So what kind of world did my older brother’s developing body prepare for based on his womb experience? Stay tuned and I will tell you more next week.
Until next time!