YOU: Having a Baby Excerpt

YOU Tips

The reason epigenetics is so important isn't because someday you'll be able to tag your baby's genes for blond hair, a composer's brain, or the ability to hurl a 98 mph fastball. It's because epigenetics teaches us this: The environment that you provide for your offspring--through what you're eating, drinking, smoking, or stressing about--is what your child will program herself to expect of the world she's entering. Based on what you're doing right now, she's forecasting her future environment. And if the programming for gene expression doesn't match that environment, problems can occur. So your challenge--dare we say your responsibility--is to provide little Dolly with a healthy environment now so that her "internal programming mechanism" predicts and can respond to a healthy environment later. Many of the tips we outline throughout the book are based on this fundamental idea, but here we'll discuss some of the major things you can do right away to positively influence the way your baby's genes are expressed.

Add Folate. Your baby needs the nutrient folate because it has a direct effect on DNA. Folate is an essential ingredient of one of the building blocks of DNA, thiamine. Without folate, your body may substitute a less effective backup building block called uracil, which can cause birth defects, primarily spina bifida. Also, a lack of folate has been shown to increase childhood cancer rates by more than 60 percent. A startling statistic, for sure, but one that reinforces the notion we just talked about: in utero nutrients influence out-of-utero health. If you're even thinking about getting pregnant, you need to supplement with 400 micrograms of folic acid (the synthetic form

of folate) every day.