Smarter, healthier babies?

[Flatty]

Pregnant women have tweaked their diets, tried prenatal education tricks, and attempted whatever else baby books and doctors have recommended—all in the quest to have happier, healthier, and perhaps even smarter babies. Mothers-to-be have latched onto fish oil, to cite one example, because of studies crediting omega-3 fatty acids with brighter babies and a lower risk of postpartum depression.

New research suggests none of the above. A study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association of more than 2,000 pregnant women who took either fish oil or vegetable oil capsules found no benefit to cognitive or language skills of babies born to fish oil-taking mothers. (Nor did fish oil seem to alleviate their postpartum depression.)

So what can women do to enhance their babies' prenatal experiences and give them a leg-up when they enter the world? In her new book Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, journalist Annie Murphy Paul explores the burgeoning field of fetal origins, which examines how the conditions we encounter before birth influence us down the line. U.S. News spoke with Paul, who shared her insight on which prenatal behaviors withstand scientific scrutiny—and which are shaky at best. Edited excerpts:

Does research support gadgets and other devices marketed to boost babies' intelligence?

Parents often try prenatal education systems, which are completely unsupported by science. There's no indication they will make your baby smarter. Likewise, playing Mozart through headphones to the pregnant belly won't increase intelligence, and could even be harmful. A fetus isn't expecting music to be blasted into the womb, and it may be so loud it causes damage.

What's the deal with chocolate—can eating it during pregnancy really benefit babies, as you say in your book?

Frequent chocolate consumption during pregnancy has been tied to a happier, less fussy baby. Pregnant women who eat five or more servings of chocolate each week have a 40 percent lower risk of developing preeclampsia, a high blood pressure condition [that can endanger the lives of both mother and child]. If you're dying to treat yourself when pregnant, I would suggest some chocolate.

You advocate that pregnant women do a "kitchen purge," especially to discard certain plastics. Why?

Household plastics often contain the chemicals bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. These chemicals are endocrine disrupters, which means they imitate the action of chemical messengers in our bodies. Even a small amount can be damaging because our bodies don't recognize them as foreign, and they can mess up the fetus's development process. You can tell if your [plastics contain BPA] by looking at the recycling code on the bottom. Anything labeled 3, 6, or 7 should go in the trash. And don't use plastic in the microwave or put it in the dishwasher, since heat can release BPA.

Speaking of toxins, what's the consensus on alcohol use during pregnancy? A recent study suggests light drinking may not harm the fetus, contrary to traditional advice to abstain.

There's a reason public health experts and doctors always say no amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy. That's not just an evasion or a stock line—it's true. We don't know how much is safe to drink and how much is problematic. The genetic makeup of the woman and the fetus also plays a role, because both will differ in how they respond to alcohol. That fuzziness is why I decided not to drink at all when I was pregnant. If you're thinking about it, remember that the fetus is most susceptible to damage from alcohol during the first trimester.

Pregnant women often go to great lengths to avoid stress. Should they be so concerned?

Traumatic, life-threatening stress—like being in a war-zone or experiencing a terrorist attack—can have a negative impact on the fetus. Some research shows an association between prenatal stress and cognitive and language skills. The more severe the stressful events, the poorer the infant's abilities, and the greater the rates of attention and behavior problems. That's why we need to have better systems in place for helping pregnant women during emergencies and disasters. Everyday stress, on the other hand, can actually be beneficial. It tones the fetus's nervous system and accelerates brain development.

In Origins, you say that exercising while pregnant makes babies healthier and smarter. Are concerns about overdoing it and harming the fetus unfounded?

Moderate exercise is very beneficial. When a woman works out, her fetus is getting a workout, too. Research suggests that women who exercise while expecting have larger babies who grow up to be smarter adults, perhaps because their brains are bigger. But if you're getting so winded you can't manage to gasp out a sentence, you're probably working out too hard. Pregnant women need to make sure they don't become dehydrated—so, drink a lot of water during and after exercise.

About 20 percent of pregnant women experience mood or anxiety disturbances, and at least 10 percent develop full-blown depression, according to your book. How does this affect the fetus?

Pregnant women who are depressed are more likely to deliver early and have babies with a low birth weight. The mother's emotional state can also influence the fetus's developing brain and nervous system, and potentially shape the way the baby will experience and manage its own emotions. Plus, babies born to depressed mothers are more likely to be irritable and have trouble sleeping. Pregnant women should be screened for depression, just as we screen for gestational diabetes.

Pregnant women are inundated with tips: Do this, but avoid that—until next week, when the advice changes. How can women become more savvy about what's worthwhile, and what they should approach more skeptically?

Women should read and learn as much as they can, and talk with their obstetrician. And remember that the fetus is resilient. We've been giving birth to babies for the entire history of humanity. If you're thinking about it and worrying about it, you're probably doing the best you can.

What's the single most important habit for pregnant women to adopt?

Nutrition. What a woman eats and drinks during pregnancy is so important—not only for her own health, but for the health of her offspring into infancy, childhood, and potentially even adulthood. Eat a well-balanced, healthy diet, with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fish. A lot of women are scared to eat seafood because of warnings about mercury, but it actually facilitates fetal brain development. Opt for kinds that are low in mercury: sardines, anchovies, tilapia, salmon, or shell-fish.

Original article here (http://health.yahoo.net/articles/pregnancy/how-have-happier-healthier-smarter-baby).

[Askari]

Something you want to tell us?

[Flatty]

Something you want to tell us?

Ah, that's the Skari I know - 6 whole words, don't strain yourself. :p

[TG]

tl;dr

[Flatty]

tl;dr

Are you having a baby? :p

[TotalWar]

tl;dr

Nicely said, also should this not be in the woman thread?

[TG]

I should just create a 'For Women' forum, and give flatty moderator rights :p

[Flatty]

I should just create a 'For Women' forum, and give flatty moderator rights :p

So, where is it? I Googled it & couldn't find it? :p

To me, even though I don't have children of my own, it's actually quite interesting what we can do to improve the physical and mental health of babies, and children. Wouldn't it be really cool if we all knew what to do to ensure that our children are born as healthy, and intelligent, as possible? That the elimination of certain foods from pregnant mother's diets might add an extra 2 inches to their child's height, or add an extra 20 points to their IQ? That consuming copious quantities of chocolate during pregnancy might make your child the next Mozart? I think it would.

[GeroW4lll]

After reading "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269) I've come to realise what I've always suspected was true. The word Medical Science is a misnomer. An oxymoron even. Your Doctor is about as accurate on this type of thing as your homoeopath, your sangoma, or any other quack you might want to follow. Doctors disguise their ignorance with science speak. But few of them do any real science.


...the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up. But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you. ...these studies rarely go on long enough to track the decades-long course of disease and ultimately death. Instead, they track easily measurable health “markers” such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, and meta-experts have shown that changes in these markers often don’t correlate as well with long-term health as we have been led to believe.

On the relatively rare occasions when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them haven’t convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.) ...

If a study somehow avoids every one of these problems and finds a real connection to long-term changes in health, you’re still not guaranteed to benefit, because studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes. Should you be among the lucky minority that stands to benefit, don’t expect a noticeable improvement in your health, because studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller. “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.

And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. ... Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.


[Doctors are] ...not trained to ... go back and look at the research papers that helped make [specific] drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. ...“Just taking the patient off everything can [often] improve their health right away.”

Some random interesting quotes from the article:


“Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”


Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, ..., researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.


He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years,... Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test ... against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. ... 41 percent had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.


When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

Scary stuff. But in my opinion, anybody who generally advises against chocolate is a quack.