Our primitive ancestors have linked nutrition, fertility, and healthy babies since virtually the beginning of time. Some cultures, while knowing nothing of nutrition, much less of micronutrients, instinctively prepared for an ensuing pregnancy with special diets for months in advance. Often, both parents participated in this ritual by practicing a lifestyle conducive to a pregnancy that would yield a healthy baby.
In modern days, few of us spend any great deal of time considering diet and lifestyle when it comes to making babies. We leave all that up to nature with an assist from our medical profession. Aside from the biological functions of the mother, we expect to produce a healthy baby with little or no really active participation on our part as parents. Any problems developing during the pregnancy are to be left in the capable hands of our obstetricians. And when the result is less than perfect, our first reaction is to blame the doctor.
The problem here is that few obstetricians understand the nutritional needs of the parents. Both of them. This is simply not a part of their training. And it can be a very important issue. Modern farming methods for example, deprive us of many of the vital nutrients we would normally expect to receive from food. Relate that to poor lifestyle, liberal consumption of fast foods and processed foods and other poor eating habits and any couple anticipating a baby is automatically at risk for having a baby born with defects or health issues of some kind.
There is abundant literature out there exhorting all of us to get our due share of supplements. The advice is all pretty well standardized. The appropriate supplements are all painstakingly tabulated for us, over and over again and again. But the one vital factor that is often overlooked is the supreme importance of a narrow group of supplements referred to as micronutrients. These supplements are most important because it is the micronutrients that eliminate birth defects and consistently produce resoundingly healthy babies.
It is totally unnecessary to have a baby with birth defects. If a pregnant woman does not have enough folic acid (vitamin B9) in her body at the very beginning of her pregnancy, neural tube defects can occur in the fetus, leading inexorably to birth defects. Another micronutrient that is at least as important is iodine. Most people understand that a shortage of iodine causes goiters. That is the least of concerns though. A deficiency of iodine in the mother can cause a malformation in the brain of the fetus, resulting in a lowered IQ in life.
Food processors have been getting the message over time and have been adding these micronutrients to their products in increasing numbers. It pays to read the labels. Many doctors are also gaining an improved understanding of this issue and guiding their patients into getting and keeping the proper nutrients in their bodies. But since it is a lot cheaper to prevent birth defects in the first place than it is to treat them afterward, all parents need to be vigorously pro-active when it comes down to that all important process of bringing a strong and healthy baby into this world.
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