Totally Devoted

I recently attended a very interesting seminar at the University of Auckland on the importance of infant nutrition and how it can affect a child's health for the rest of their life. The seminar was run over a day, covered a number of topics and had a range of different academics speaking on the subject.

The first speaker spoke on a subject called 'formative plasticity'. This means how an organisms genetics can be influenced and change within their lifetime based on environmental stimuli. He spoke of how a queen bee and worker bee have identical genes at birth. The only reason a queen becomes a queen is based on her nutrition. He also pointed out that humans have 90% of the same genes as insects when it came to formative plasticity. This talk set the tone for the rest of the seminar by illustrating how our genes also very responsive to our environment.

The next speaker spoke about how mothers who are obese during pregnancy expose their children to a number of health risks. She showed through her experiments that mothers that were obese during pregnancy could cause a negative change in their child's brain development that would give them a higher propensity toward obesity. Not to get into too much detail, but it related to the brains ability to measure their blood sugar levels etc, meaning that the child could over eat.

Another speaker showed that an undernourished mother during pregnancy would have exactly the same adverse on her childs future health as an overweight one. In this instance you're gearing the child to be's genes for an environment of thrift. This means that their body will have a lower metabolism, be less active, and have a higher desire for energy rich foods. The problem arises when they are born into a world of plenty and this 'nutritional mismatch' occurs, which inevitably leads to obesity.

Obesity was not the only negative health outcome on children as a result of the mothers nutrition during pregnancy. A higher propensity toward diabetes, high blood pressure and even cancer were listed. All speakers definitely dismissed the concept of 'eating for two'.

The last speaker covered off the importance of micro nutrients in early life for life long health. The ones to take center stage were Iron, Folate, B12 and Vitamin D. It was suggested that micro nutrients had a far greater bearing on a babys size and body composition that even protein.

All in all a very interesting seminar, reminding us of why both mothers and new research suggests fathers both have to be very careful with their diet and nutrition from before conception through to birth and after during breastfeeding.