It Is Not Only Food that We Ingest

Anything that goes into a carrying mother’s system will affect the baby.   Medication, above all. And we may not be aware of it, but the biochemicals processing anxiety and depression too. The mother and fetus are in many ways one system.  The mother is depressed and so is the baby; he will be largely more lifeless than normals.  Heavy repression is going on, which diminishes energy levels; which is also very true in anxiety where energy levels are increased.  The baby may be born hyperactive and soon may not be able to sit still or concentrate early in life.

Here is a study that throws light on the problem.   (Science Daily sept 18, 2016, Depression in Pregnancy, see https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160928101100.htm)  This study maintains that depression can reduce  the enzyme in the placenta  that breaks down stress hormones in the fetus which then produces epigenetic changes  when the baby is stressed.  The DNA remains the same but how and when it is expressed changes.  Here may be the beginning of mental health problems in the baby. It may look like inherited depression, but no.  The carrying mother’s physical state has much to do with it.  Experience changes how genetics is carried out.  And that too often includes the medications the mother takes which alters the baby”s system.  An adult dose for a newborn may be overwhelming and life-threatening. Any drug can produce major biologic changes in the baby.  We need to be aware of that.  A baby is not an adult.  And too many mothers take a couple of pills in the morning without thinking of the lifelong consequences on the offspring. “It is just a mild painkiller,” we rationalize but it is not mild for the baby.   These pills may aid serious repression. It can set up  a lifelong prototype  of being “down”  in the baby. As the pills inside of him re-set  a new his natural state:  repression.   He is sent to a doctor in his childhood.  He is asked whether he has taken any drugs?  “No” he says, unaware of the embedded memory of drugs that his mother and he took together when he was a fetus that set up a prototype.

In one sense, the depressive mother’s “down” tendency can become part of the child’s inheritance and it becomes very difficult to separate out what contributes to abnormality.  Is it really experience or pure genetics.   I vote for genetics given expression by experience. Is it inherited?   We have to understand inheritance to know what we mean.  Are we inheriting pure genetics (blue eyes) or are we inheriting a hyperactive system which may be a combination of the two. Some of the recent research shows a wide discrepancy between actual age and  methylation age (an accumulation of life’s traumas).  The latter is far more accurate estimate for our longevity.  It makes sense that trauma wreaks havoc on our biologic system and curtails its endurance.

It seems now by carefully studying methylation age (the age of accumulated traumas) we are measuring one’s longevity.  It is something we have noted for decades; that early life lack of love, neglect and lack of touch shorten our life span.  They certainly point to the build-up of serious illness.   Most serious scientific papers urge the search for what factors we can add to prolong good health.  My vote is for our therapy because when we lower body temperature on a long term basis for example, we extend life.  I recently quoted a study on body temp that seems to confirm this point. Why?  Because we reduce the constant work of the body, save energy so that system is more relaxed and healthy. Early life is critical to how long we live and if we are to inherit terrible afflictions.  Love the child at age one and prevent illness at age fifty.    Not a bad bargain.