Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

by Catherine Shanahan

A 2010 study looking into how poor maternal nutrition and obesity affects subsequent generations concluded, “Poor in utero nutrition may be a major contributor to the current cycle of obesity.”33 The article shows that children born to overweight mothers are epigenetically programmed to build adipose tissue in unhealthy amounts. This suggests that millions of malnourished moms are, unbeknownst to them, programming their children for a lifetime of being overweight, and that this predisposition for putting on the pounds can be passed down to that child’s children as well.

I’m sorry to say that such professional complacency is increasingly common in medicine. Although we tell pregnant patients to quit smoking and drinking and to take their prenatal pills, and we screen for certain diseases, the list of childhood epidemics keeps stacking up. That’s a tragedy. But for the most part, we physicians simply go about our business assuming someone else will someday do something about it. This apathy toward prenatal care has affected the way the general public thinks, as well. I brought up the prenatal pill earlier, so let’s look at that as one example. A woman recently came to see me already seven weeks pregnant with her third baby in less than three years. Most women have no idea that the prenatal vitamin pill works best when taken before conception because it helps to boost a woman’s vitamin levels to prepare for the first ten weeks of pregnancy, the time when the most fundamental decisions about how to shape the baby’s body are made. After that window of opportunity has shut, though it can still improve birth weight, the vitamin pill can do little to prevent most major birth defects.163 This mother’s third child will be at high risk not just for disfiguring facial changes but also for skeletal and organ defects which will likely turn him or her into another chronic disease statistic before graduating high school. Still, this is likely the first time you’ve heard this bit of information about prenatal vitamins, which tells us something about the d...

Synthetic vitamin pills are, of course, a step up from no nutrition at all, but they are a sorry replacement for real food. First, they’re not the same as what nature makes. Many vitamins exist in nature as entire families of related molecules, only a few of which can be recreated in a factory. For example, there may be over 100 isomers of vitamin E, but only about 16 are put into tablets.164 Second, the processing of synthetic vitamins necessarily involves the creation of incidental molecular byproducts, the effects of which are largely unknown. About half of the content of vitamin E tablets are isomers that don’t exist in nature, which might explain why some studies show that taking synthetic vitamin E pills increases mortality. Third, without the proper carrier nutrients in the right balance, many vitamins are not absorbed. Fourth, many vitamins work synergistically with other nutrients in ways we don’t fully understand. Fifth, who knows what else is in that pill? The entire supplement industry is essentially unregulated, and supplements have been found to be contaminated with toxic compounds including lead or dangerously high levels of copper.165 But again, there is some benefit to taking certain supplements, especially in pregnancy, because the food supply is so bereft of nutrients when compared with foods from only seventy years ago.166, 167, 168