The same report noted the United States had more neonatologists and newborn intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — but still had a higher rate of infant mortality than any of those nations.
Bonnie - as we alluded to when a UNICEF report came out late last year, this is beyond unconscionable. Until prevention and nutrition are taken seriously for every cycle of pregnancy, including fertility preparation and preconception, these numbers will not likely improve. See the following pieces published by the LA Times.
Poor nutrition in utero, heavy child tomorrow?
Fourteen percent of U.S. preschoolers are overweight. This fact alone points to perhaps the strongest evidence for the effects of fetal programming.
Multiple studies have shown that either underfeeding or overfeeding the fetus during pregnancy can affect how a child's body will respond to food over a lifetime, increasing the risk for diabetes, heart disease and hypertension.
"The fetus is reading the environment during development and is using that to predict what the environment will be once it's born," says Jerry Heindel, a fetal-programming expert at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. "If the fetus gets poor nutrition, it will set itself up to be able to adjust to that. If it has poor nutrition during life, it will do quite well. But later in life, if nutrition changes and becomes like the food we're eating today, that is a mismatch, and that will increase the susceptibility to disease."
At a recent nutrition conference in Boston sponsored by Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, the audience of nutritionists and nutrition researchers is rapt as Barker elaborates on this provocative message: Attempts to prevent such common chronic diseases as heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and diabetes have largely failed because the origins of such diseases most likely begin in the womb.
Exposure to a high level of blood sugar or fat before birth can change the development of fat cells and the pathways in the brain that regulate appetite, says Beverly Mühlhäusler, a researcher at the University of South Australia's Early Origins of Adult Health Laboratory and an authority on fetal diet and adult disease.
"What research is now showing is that consuming an excessive amount of high-fat, high-sugar foods during pregnancy can alter the development of the baby in such a way that predisposes that individual to becoming obese later in life," she says.
Scientists from Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research recently found that children of pregnant women untreated for high levels of blood sugar were 89% more likely to be overweight and 82% more likely to be obese by the time they were ages 5 to 7 compared with children born to women who had normal blood sugar levels during pregnancy. The study was published last month in Diabetes Care.
Mounting evidence suggests that fetuses are surprisingly susceptible to outside influences such as food, environmental pollutants, even stress.
What women eat, touch and breathe during pregnancy now appears to be more important to their babies' health than anyone ever imagined. Mounting scientific evidence suggests that fetuses are surprisingly susceptible to outside influences, such as food, environmental chemicals and pollutants, infections, even stress. Under this theory -- called fetal programming -- babies are born not just with traits dictated by their parents' genes, such as brown eyes and olive skin. They may be born with a tendency to develop asthma, diabetes or other illnesses based on what their mothers ate and were exposed to during pregnancy.
"Fetal life and early infancy are now recognized as periods of remarkable susceptibility to environmental hazards," says Dr. David Barker, a British researcher who is widely credited with recognizing the link between low birth weight and later cardiovascular disease. "The diets of mothers have massive long-term effects on their babies."
Still, many fetal-programming experts say reproductive-age men and women need to know that they probably have more control over their children's future health than they realize.
History has delivered several sobering reminders that the human fetus is vulnerable to outside influences. Birth defects caused by medications such as thalidomide in the late 1950s and more recently the acne drug Accutane demonstrate that doses that have little effect on an adult can cause devastating changes in a fetus.
Other studies have linked low levels of the vitamin folate and increased levels of the amino acid homocysteine with an increased risk of schizophrenia. In a study published in January in the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers found that high homocysteine levels in the third trimester doubled schizophrenia risk in the offspring, perhaps by altering brain structure or function or through subtle damage to the placenta to reduce oxygen delivery to the fetus. And increasingly, scientists fear that fetuses and young children may be harmed by pesticides and pollutants that, at the same level, cause no measurable harm in adults. For example, some common pesticides are thought to be so-called endocrine disrupters, chemicals that change hormone function in utero and can affect reproductive organ development and function later in life. A study in the March issue of Human Reproduction found that women who ate more than seven servings a week of beef during pregnancy had sons who were more likely to have poor sperm quality as adults -- possibly due to the hormones fed to cattle.
Likewise, levels of air pollutants commonly found in many urban areas may cross the placenta of a pregnant woman and affect her fetus. More than a dozen studies worldwide have linked air pollution to low birth weight, stillbirth and intrauterine growth retardation. According to the World Health Organization, air pollution can impair lung function in the womb.
The implications of fetal programming are profound, Heindel says. Some preliminary research suggests that an environmental influence in pregnancy may not only affect the fetus but also future generations as well.
For example, pregnant women who took the medication diethylstilbestrol -- used from 1938 to 1971 to prevent miscarriage and other problems in pregnancy -- gave birth to daughters with higher risks of infertility, menstrual irregularities and a rare genital-tract cancer after puberty. Now the children of the so-called DES daughters are reaching adult age, and studies suggest that the defect may persist into a third generation.
Sons of the DES daughters have a higher risk of hypospadias, a misplaced opening of the penis. Daughters of the DES daughters may have altered reproductive tract function, according to a study published last year.
Scientists refer to such changes as epigenetics. During critical time periods of human development, the body alters gene expression (even though the DNA sequence itself is unchanged), which may lead to a predisposition to disease in the offspring.
"That means what your grandmother was exposed to could affect your health today," says Heindel. "That is what makes this so scary. The data is so scanty at this time that we don't know how strong that is. If it turns out to be true, it could be very important."
Although many questions about fetal programming remain, enough is now known to alert consumers.
"Knowledge is power," he says. "The more you can know about having healthy babies, the better."
Bonnie - these two pieces are quite profound and mirror some of the issues we have been focusing on this year, such as epigenetics and reducing our toxic load. Now, it is not just about taking care of ourselves anymore. If you are at a reproductive age, male or female, every lifestyle choice you make affects not affects you, but several generations after you.
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