The old expression “you are what you eat” should be “you are what your mother eats.” That’s because the diet of a pregnant and nursing mom impacts a baby’s cognitive, physical, social and emotional health, as well as the tastebuds that will set up the child’s lifelong food preferences, says Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a maternal-child health researcher at the Yale School of Public Health. Once babies start eating solid food at six months, their diet in the first two years lays the foundation for their tastebuds, cognitive and physical development and long-term risk for chronic diseases, he says.
The lifelong impact that maternal and child nutrition has on developing brains and bodies — coined the “first 1,000 days,” from conception to age 2 — has been well established for more than a decade after the Lancet published a worldwide study in 2008. Poor nutrition in the first 1,000 days can contribute to irreversible damage to babies' growing brains and set the stage for later obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and other chronic health problems, according to the Lancet study.
Advances in brain-imaging techniques have demonstrated that there are consequences for children who lack healthy food and a healthy home environment. “Regions of the brain that regulate social and emotional development get negatively affected,” Pérez-Escamilla says. “And that affects them throughout their lives.”
