Over the past few weeks I have been talking more and more about how your lifestyle during pregnancy influences your baby’s development from the cellular level. There is still more to understanding how this all even happens, but don’t worry it won’t get too complicated 🙂
As you know I always say that moms are the baby’s very first role model starting from the time of conception. Each cell is developing in a way that follows in the footsteps of how their mother’s body is functioning. This makes sense right? Their body has to know how to design itself to operate for the world they will be born into. Your baby’s cells don’t know if your body is not functioning optimally for health, they just know that you are alive and therefore to survive in the same world they must develop similarly to you. This in my opinion is where nurture starts. Moms nurture their baby/babies by doing their absolute best with doing what they can and know to do in order to be healthy and provide the best foundation of health for their little bun in the oven.
Then nature comes in and in the form of the mother’s environment and therefore the environment of your womb. The mother’s environment consists of all the things she comes in contact with, experiences, consumes, and feels. The environment plays a big role in your baby’s overall development as well. Not only is your baby following your lead in how their body will function but also learning from you what the world will be like. Environmental information is helpful for them because this tells their genes which ones should turn on or off and under what circumstances they should respond. This concept of environmental influences on gene expression is known as Epigenetics.
Epigenetics are heritable changes in how a gene will function without actually changing the DNA sequence. We experience this every single second of every single day. This is important for survival; the genes in our cells need to do this in order to adjust to our differing environments within our everyday life.
However, while your baby is in your womb epigenetic factors have a greater influence than any other time in their life. To be clear epigenetics don’t change your baby’s genetic makeup, but they do (in a foundational way) determine which of the genes in a baby’s DNA sequence will become functional. Obviously nine months does not give a complete picture of how the next 110 years are going to be (I’m assuming they will live this long 🙂 ) but it does give them enough information to establish the first layer of their foundation of health that will further be built upon after birth over the next 110 years.
Another reason why epigenetic influences are so powerful in these nine months is because it also affects your future grandchildren. You may be more familiar with knowing that baby girls are born with all the eggs they will ever have. However, what you may not know is that baby boys are born with undeveloped immature sperm cells that replicate copies of themselves for future use. If the original cells are damaged or killed this leads to sterilization since the body does not have a way to make copies to create sperm cells.
All that was discussed today is part of the big picture basics of why your baby’s/babies life in the womb impacts the rest of their life. The week after next we will talk about what else epigenetics and genes establish before birth. Why the week after next? Father’s Day is this Sunday! So next week I am dedicating to Dads!