The adult children of mothers who ate more meat during pregnancy don’t just walk around with higher baseline stress hormone levels but also appear to react more negatively to whatever life throws at them. Researchers tracked down the now grown-up kids whose mothers had been part of the double-the-meat experiment and measured their cortisol levels after a stressful public-speaking challenge. If their moms had eaten fewer than two daily servings of meat (fish included) while carrying them, they got relatively small surges of stress hormones from their adrenal glands.
