From the moment your baby is conceived they are learning from you. The cells, organs, systems, and networks of your baby’s body develop in a way that mimics how your body is functioning during pregnancy. Your baby’s cells don’t necessarily know if your body is functioning optimally. They just know that you are alive and to live in the world they will be born into their body must function like yours. You are essentially their very first role model.
Since we have been on the topic of how moms influence weight gain I wanted to bring to light a little more of understanding how exactly the baby’s metabolism develops in a way that mimics their mother’s during development for survival. To start this off let’s go back in time just a little…
In 2007 the Harvard Medical School conducted a study with 1,044 mother-child pairs to determine how weight gain impacted their children’s weight later in life. During this study they discovered that the greater the weight gain of mother had during pregnancy was associated with their children being heavier by age 3. Women who gained more weight than the recommended (25-35 pounds) and even those whose weight gain was within the recommended range had four times the risk of having an overweight toddler. The following year the same team from the Harvard Medical School conducted another study and found that this relationship persists into adolescents.
It is important to know that it is not just a matter of weight gain from fat stores. There is something else going on along with it. For example (but not limited to), how their body metabolizes and uses insulin is affected. Insulin is produced by beta cells in the pancreas. When these babies are not getting the nutrients they need (from high calorie/low nutrient foods) they are essentially malnourished and there beta cells are developing to make less insulin and mange blood sugar much differently than if they had all the nutrients they needed.
This is not necessarily a “bad” thing! The baby’s body thinks that they will need to be more sensitive to insulin since they are planning to be in a world where there may not be enough food to keep blood sugar up. So their body is designed in a way to do just that. By doing this their bodies will be able to keep sufficient blood sugar levels up in a time of famine or fasting. There is only an issue with the blood sugar when there system is in a sense, flooded with it when food is more freely available then what they were actually prepared to handle.
Their hormone release and signaling are also affected. For example, ghrelin and leptin are two hormones that regulate appetite. Ghrelin lets us know when we are hungry. Leptin is the hormone that lets us know when we have had enough food and regulates fat stores.These hormones communicate with the hypothalamus in our brain to let us know “hey I need food” or “okay that is enough” to maintain energy balance. If babies are not getting enough nutrients in the womb their bodies are developing in way to take in more food and create more fat stores to maintain energy to survive in the world they will be born into. This is also one of the reasons why these babies metabolize fats and carbohydrates differently.
How their body metabolizes food and how sensitive they are to weight gain is only due to the fact that their body was prepared for a different kind of life. A life in which their body assumes it needs to store fat and keep enough sugar in the blood with more ease to survive in a world with limited food supply to do so.
This brings me to another concept but I plan to talk about that next week 🙂