Mom's Healthy Diet Might Cut Birth Defect Risk

GRAPHIC BIRTH DEFECT IMAGES HAVE BEEN REMOVED.

From HealthDay News. Might? MIGHT? Ask Weston A. Price, or any molecular biologist, or even anthropologist about what happens when mothers eat a bad diet--hell, lots of us have birth defects, but they aren't obvious: crooked teeth from too-small jaws, the need for glasses, short stature, homosexuality, general susceptibility to sickness, pigeon-toes, all manner of things we accept today as "normal"...then the things that are obvious: autism, retardation, extra or missing limbs, cleft palate, spina bifida, misshapen heads, etc. Nutrition directly affects them all!

"Pregnant women who eat a healthy diet appear to reduce the risk of having a baby with a major birth defect, such as spina bifida or a cleft lip or palette, a new study suggests.

Neural tube birth defects -- including spina bifida and other brain abnormalities -- are known to decrease when pregnant women take supplements of folic acid, a type of vitamin B that also has been added to a variety of foods. However, folic acid alone does not prevent all birth defects, the researchers said.

"There may be certain qualities of foods that have benefits that aren't captured by examining just one nutrient at a time," said lead researcher Suzan L. Carmichael, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford University.

Diet could also be related to reducing birth defects because a combination of nutrients from a variety of foods may act together in a beneficial way, Carmichael said. "It is also possible that a healthy diet is a marker for other characteristics of a woman's lifestyle.

"Our study supports recommendations that have been made for many years for pregnant women," she said. "Eat a variety of foods, include a lot of fruits and vegetables and whole grains in your diet and take a vitamin supplement that contains folic acid."

Although folic acid can prevent up to 40 percent of neural tube defects, it's not the whole story, Carmichael said. "Babies are still born with neural tube defects, so we need to keep looking for answers," she said.

The report was published in the Oct. 3 online edition of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Using data from the U.S. National Birth Defects Prevention Study for October 1997 through December 2005, Carmichael's team looked at the role diet plays in birth defects. During telephone interviews, mothers described their diet.

The researchers looked at cases of 936 infants born with neural tube defects, 2,475 with oral clefts, and compared these with 6,147 infants without birth defects.

They found that women with diets similar to the Mediterranean Diet -- which is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish and light in fats and sugar -- or the Food Guide Pyramid of the U.S. Department of Agriculture were at lower risk of having a baby with a neural tube defect or oral cleft, compared to women who reported eating less-healthy diets.

This finding remained even after adjusting for other factors such as taking a vitamin or mineral supplement, the researchers noted. "We found that diet was important whether a women took a vitamin supplement or not," Carmichael said.

Most women who gave birth to an infant who did not have a birth defect were white and had more than a high school education, the researchers found. Among mothers in the survey, 19 percent smoked, 38 percent drank, 78 percent took folic acid supplements and 16 percent were obese.

David R. Jacobs, Jr., the Mayo Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and co-author of an accompanying journal editorial, said, "We have confused the constituents of food with food itself. Food is a complex mixture."

There may be a number of right ways to eat, and some diets that are not so good, he said. Generally, foods are better than supplements except when there is a deficiency, he added.

Jacobs noted that foods are more complex than drugs that contain only a single element and have been tested. "Foods are not well understood," he said.

"There are some better ways to eat and supplements are probably not the right answer -- we should eat food," Jacobs said. One should not eat too much and eat mostly plants, he added.

Commenting on the study, Gail Harrison, a professor of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and spokeswoman for the March of Dimes, said, "I am not surprised that there is an independent effect of total diet quality."

The finding underscores the importance of the mother's nutrition both before and during pregnancy and the effect it can have on the developing infant, she said. "A lot that goes on that determines pregnancy outcome goes on very early in the pregnancy -- before women even realize they're pregnant," she said.

Harrison noted that healthy eating needs to start even before pregnancy. "Women who are capable of becoming pregnant really need to pay attention to overall diet quality," she said."

Did you know that prenatal vitamins work best when you take them BEFORE getting pregnant? Real nutritionists with a background or familiarity with molecular biology will tell you that you should "eat for pregnancy" all the time, because you never know when you'll become pregnant, and you should always be prepared--the most critical time in baby formation is in the first days. At the time you figure out you're pregnant, it's already too late--prenatal vitamins may help with minor parental nutritional deficits, but the baby's already formed, and formed out of what you've been eating.

This, to me, is evidence that our RDAs are badly in need of updating--we actually need as much as ten times the quantity of some vitamins/minerals than our RDAs tell us we need, and our current daily vitamins give us. Like any government-sponsored eating guide, the RDA will only keep you alive, but not healthy, and certainly not healthy enough to produce offspring with any genetic wealth to speak of!

You may consider this another part of the population-engineering I spoke of here.

Diet alone doesn't do all the damage--smoking, exposure to depleted uranium, alcohol, heavy metal toxicity, and other non-food things also do damage, but the condition of your body and overall health is the first and foremost factor in creating a healthy baby. Diet just gets the ball rolling.

What's worse than these largely surgically-correctable disfigurements is the fact that your child is now genetically set up for pre-disposure to having a malformed child of his/her own, despite whatever corrective diet action is taken. It will take at least three generations of corrective diet, and clean environment and lifestyle, to eliminate possibility of returning deformity to the family tree--it doesn't end with just your child, and unless you start cleaning up your diet and overall health, it doesn't end with just that one child--all your children stand a good chance of deformity of some sort.

It's happening in the animal kingdom too--lots of two-headed and/or two-tailed animals of all sorts are being born.