One final piece of the FOAD story is so intrinsically fascinating that it made me stop thinking like a worried parent for a few minutes and instead I just marveled at biology. Suppose you have a fetus exposed to lots of stress, say, malnutrition, and who thus programs a thrifty metabolism. Later, as an adult, she gets pregnant. She consumes normal amounts of food. Because she has that thrifty metabolism, is so good at storing away nutrients in case that fetal famine ever comes back again, her body grabs a disproportionate share of the nutrients in her bloodstream for herself. In other words,
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