I read this book a few years ago, before I was even doing this blog and way before I was ready to start thinking about having a baby. I picked it up just because I was interested in it, at the time, and thought it had to have some really fascinating information in it, for anyone, not just for moms and dads. But now that I am a mom and have been pregnant, this book took on a whole new meaning to it. Paul basically has gone through the serious scientific research on fetal origins and the study of fetuses (is that the correct plural? I should know after reading an entire book about them!) and dumbs it down for the average layperson to understand. (Just kidding about the dumbing it down; it doesn't feel dumbed down, really.) She also wrote the book while she was going through her second pregnancy, and organized the book by each chapter being related to each month of her pregnancy (two months along, three months along, etc.) A lot of the research is on how what the mother does or how the mother lives can affect the fetus inside her, from what she eats (as every pregnant woman is overly aware) to what she breathes in (pollution reaches the fetus and shows up in supposedly clean cord blood) to how stressed she is (when pregnant mothers go through a huge stress-inducing event [like the death of a spouse or a terrorist attack] it can cause their babies to have different mental illnesses later). I thought Paul did a really great job of organizing the studies and writing about them in an interesting way. She also did plenty of interviews and talked to many of the scientists whose work she was writing about, so it was interesting to hear about things in their own words and not just summarized by Paul herself. She also interweaved all of her findings with a kind of memoir-like style about her own pregnancy and experiences, which was compelling and personalizing. (But she never says what they named the baby in the end! Come on!)
It was very interesting reading these things from an impersonal point of view, like, oh, that's nice that babies whose mothers eat lots of non-mercury type fish are smarter in the long run. But then when you have to start applying that to yourself it could drive you totally crazy freaked out--because I NEVER eat fish except for tuna fish sandwiches and those have mercury in them so I'm really not supposed to have them at all, so maybe when I'm pregnant I'd better start buying and making more fish and eating it like 2x a week so that my baby can be smarter! And yeah, maybe I should buy and make more fish (and I'm always meaning to) but that's just one of the things I haven't quite figured out yet in the kitchen (as not-hard as it is, I know). So should I really stress out about that? Or should I feel awesome that I don't smoke or drink at all and we live in a relatively less-polluted area so my baby will at least not be negatively affected by those things? I think it's good to try to make some positive changes towards your health for the sake of your baby while you're pregnant, for their sake and for yours, but I also am well-aware of the difficulty of managing to eat anything some days when you're pregnant, much less a nutrient-packed meal with veggies and omega-3s. So I think all of this needs to be taken with a grain of salt and I just need to be happy with whatever I can do (whenever I do get pregnant again, of course).
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