Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

For a fetus, and the child who comes after, malnutrition is an undeniable force—destructive, long lasting, and in some cases irreversible. Poor nutrition in early childhood is famously linked to lower IQ, even when you control for the mother’s IQ. Behavioral outcomes suffer, too. Malnourished babies tend to become adolescents who have difficulty with self-control, long-term planning, violent impulses, and other social aggression. Malnourished mothers are far more likely to have malnourished babies and are also likely to give birth to underweight newborns—another factor in lowered IQ and stunted cognitive development—and/or they give birth before their due date, yet another proven factor that compromises baby brains. These kids meet their cognitive benchmarks later in life and tend to score lower overall in math, in spatial reasoning, in language.