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Pregnancy / Prenatal Nutrition and Birth Defects
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It appears that isolation from Western civilization and its foods of commerce, combined with obedience to time-honored dietary traditions and folklore in the local population, afforded a diet that protected health and lengthened lifespan. Birth defects were non-existent and the strongest genetic profiles transferred easily to each generation. The dietary traditions found in the knowledge and folklore of these isolated cultures looked nothing like our modern USDA Food Pyramid, unless, perhaps, if it is turned upside-down and all the foodstuffs are consumed in their unrefined state.
Vitamin deficiencies known to cause birth defects in animals include thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, folate, and vitamins A, B6, B12, C, D, E, and K. In animal studies, shortages of these nutrients cause cleft palate, hydrocephalus (water on the brain), Siamese twins, and kidney, limb, eye and brain malformations.
Post-Soviet Russia offers a shocking view of the combined effects of pollution and starvation on human progeny. The head of Russia’s environmental commission states that ten percent of Russian children are born with deformities (increasing by two percent annually). One-fifth of these is attributed to environmental toxins.5 He cites studies that point to the widespread use of foods contaminated with agricultural chemicals along with grinding poverty that keeps pregnant women from obtaining little more than survival levels of protein, minerals, and vitamins. The Russian diet rarely includes meat, fish, eggs, or dairy. Neonatal nutrition for many Russian women is primarily starchy food, providing carbohydrate calories and little more.6 UNICEF reports that only nine percent of Russian babies are considered completely healthy. It is of little surprise that a staggering sixty percent of Russian infants show signs of rickets.7
Long ago, nutritional pioneers such as McCarrison, Price, and Lee accurately predicted this kind of genetic destruction, acquired through dietary patterns, which passes to the chromosomes of the next generation. Russia stands as a glaring example of their warning.
Let us now consider what is known about the consequences of carrying a baby while starved of the proper nutrients.
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Selected Nutrients Associated with Types of Birth Defects in Humans |
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Nutrient |
Consequences of Deficiency to the Baby |
| Vitamin B6 |
Clubfoot, cleft lip and palate |
| Folic Acid |
Neural tube defects (incomplete development of the brain or spinal cord): spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and numerous nervous system and brain deformities.8 Orofacial defects from low folic acid and related B vitamins are noted to develop in the very early stages of pregnancy before a woman even is aware that she is pregnant.9 |
| Riboflavin |
Failure to grow, thrive, and develop. |
| Thiamine |
Heart defects affecting rhythm and heart size. |
| Vitamin A |
The eye needs more vitamin A than any other organ during its embryonic development.10 After several successive generations, test animals fed vitamin A-deficient diets are born without eyes.
It is noteworthy here to examine the outcome of a large-scale Boston Medical University study examining the effect of vitamin A supplementation during pregnancy on the need for eyeglasses in children.11 The would-be long-term study of 22,748 women was truncated due to unexpected and alarming results. As the researchers examined the incoming data, it became clear that the supplemental vitamin A test group was experiencing an alarming rate of birth defects. At 10,000 IU per day of synthetic vitamin A, the rate of birth defects was 240% higher than the expected norm. At 20,000 IU per day, the rate soared to almost 400% higher than normal.
What was significant about this study was that women whose diets contained natural food sources of vitamin A showed no increase in birth defects, even at levels in excess of the synthetic supplements. Thus, naturally occurring vitamin A tends not to approach the teratogenic levels found with synthetic vitamin A.
Based on the limited results of this study, toxic levels of synthetic vitamin A appear to cause malformed heart and heart valves, abnormal brain and nervous system development (including hydrocephalus), and cleft lip and palette.
It is interesting to note that isoretinoin (13- cis-retinoic acid), a drug prescribed for treating severe cystic acne, is a synthetic chemical with vitamin A activity that causes a characteristic set of birth defects in fetuses: malformed or absent external ears or auditory canals and conotruncal heart defects.12 |
| Vitamin K |
Chlorophyll, in its natural, fat-soluble state, is the “blood” of plants. Vitamin K is a natural constituent of fat-soluble chlorophyll and has profound effects upon the developing fetus. This vitamin is essential to the formation of prothrombin in the liver, the precursor of thrombin, which is the blood-clotting factor of the blood. Fresh, raw, green leafy vegetables provide vitamin K to the mother and fetus.
Deficiencies of K during pregnancy may lead to subdural hemorrhage and death.13 Birth trauma increases this risk. Additionally, deformities associated with prenatal vitamin K deficiency include shortened fingers, cupped ears, flat nasal bridges, and underdevelopment of the nose, mouth, and mid-face.14,15 Anticonvulsive drugs taken during pregnancy block vitamin K activity and thus are linked to these birth defects. |
| Iron |
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), iron-deficiency anemia is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world. WHO estimates for iron deficiency range as high as 80% of the world population (5 billion people). WHO states that at least one-third of the world is currently anemic.
The fetus must store in the liver a six-month supply of iron (the key component of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin) for post-partum life. The infant GI tract is too immature to absorb large iron-containing molecules during this time. Thus, the pregnant mother must have enough of this mineral to allow sufficient storage in the fetus. Maternal hemorrhages threaten iron-deficient pregnancies.
Iron deficient babies are often smaller and shorter.16 Recent studies have positively associated brain function with iron levels in children. Iron deficient students were 200% more likely to score below average on national math tests.17 Even though iron-deficient children often had no signs of clinical anemia, they still demonstrated lower test scores. |
| Iodine |
Iodine deficiency during pregnancy can result in congenital myxedema (cretinism).18 This defect is characterized in childhood by dwarfed stature, mental retardation, dystrophy of the bones, and a low basal metabolism.
Mild iodine deficiency has been reported to reduce intelligence quotients by 10-15% and cause increased rates of stillbirths, perinatal mortality, and infant mortality.19
Thyroxin, an important endocrine hormone, is 65% iodine by weight.20 |
| Magnesium |
When magnesium was given as a supplement to pregnant women to treat high blood pressure and premature labor, a government study found that this trace mineral sharply reduced the risk of cerebral palsy and retardation in the women’s babies.21 Very-low birthweight babies, whose mothers ingested magnesium supplements during pregnancy, were about 90 percent less likely to develop cerebral palsy and 70 percent less likely to be retarded than infants whose mothers didn’t receive supplemental magnesium. |
| Zinc |
Deficiency of zinc is common where food is raised on soil deficient in this trace mineral. Lack of zinc in pregnancy has been associated with premature birth, prolonged labor, and increased risk to the fetus as well as impaired growth and development and lowered immunity in the baby.22 Toxemia and anemia have also been associated with zinc deficiency in pregnancy.23
Zinc deficiency during pregnancy has been related to many congenital abnormalities of the nervous system in children, who may later develop reduced learning ability, apathy, and mental retardation.24
Zinc deficiency has been cited as teratogenic. 15 to 20 mg of zinc per day during pregnancy could potentially avert between 7 to 60% of all low-weight births. The range is wide because it is often difficult to isolate the effects of zinc deficiency from other micro-minerals that are concurrently deficient.25 |
| General Malnutrition aused by famine during pregnancy |
Long-term research by Columbia University and University Hospital Utrecht in the Netherlands showed a Malnutrition significant spike in schizophrenia during the “Dutch Hunger Winter,” a severe famine that occurred aused by famine between October 1944 and May 1945. The incidence of schizophrenia was 200% higher among Dutch during pregnancy who were conceived, gestated, and born during the Nazi occupation and blockade late in WWII 26 during which all transport of food was banned over inland waterways to the western part of Holland, where such large cities as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague are located. Adding to the severe rationing since early in the war, the situation was soon desperate. There was a high mortality rate during the famine and a significant increase in neural tube birth defects in babies.
Much like a tree does not show growth rings during years of drought, the layers or folds of areas in the brain apparently did not develop in the fetuses of starving pregnant women. These children were far more likely to develop schizophrenia and this study led the researchers to suggest that half of all schizophrenia may be the result of malnutrition during pregnancy. This has great implications for the study of schizophrenia and other forms of developmental mental illness. Certain cases of schizophrenia can almost certainly be considered birth defects related to nutritional deficiency. |
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