Just how important is the pre-birth development environment?
Going through my human biology course is a major education in a whole lot of respects and perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of that are the whole raft of implications for later life that are related to what happens before you’re even born.
Clearly it is a “good thing” to have a well fed and healthy mum thus the market for prenatal vitamins is very much an easy sale. However, the development that happens before you’re born affects your life in all kinds of ways that you might not expect.
For instance, if your mum was lacking in some essential nutrients or oxygen along during your gestation period then what happens is that you’ll have grabbed enough of everything to keep yourself in shape before you were born by taking more from her (obviously assuming that she wasn’t severely malnourished). However, in doing that you’ll have concentrated on the requirements of your brain therefore chances are you’ll have been born with a slightly larger head in relation to the size of your body as compared to other “normal” children. OK, so you’re born and everything is fine? Except that it isn’t because being born like that means that you’re much more likely to develop high blood pressure in later life.
That’s just one of the peculiar effects that atypical conditions pre-birth can have on your later life: there are lots more.
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