Mom’s nutritional status before and during pregnancy influences how much facial and body symmetry her child develops.
In the context of modern diet, birth order correlates with two distinct symmetry shifts away from ideal.
Studies show that most women are nutritionally deficient during childbearing years.
Eating sweets and fried foods during pregnancy is likely to be as detrimental as smoking and drinking, if not moreso.
All evidence suggests that optimizing nutrition represents a powerful strategy for creating healthy, beautiful babies.
Almost nothing gives a woman more pride and confidence than the birth of her first child. After one successful pregnancy, there is an understandable expectation that a second pregnancy will go even more smoothly. And perhaps it will, at least for mom; more distensible pelvic tissues do facilitate an easier second labor.122 But unless the mother gives herself ample time (generally at least three years) and nutrients for her body to fully replenish itself, child number two may not be as healthy as his older sibling. And so, while big brother goes off to football practice, or big sister gets a modeling job, the second sibling will be spending time in the offices of the local optometrists and orthodontists. It’s not that they got the “unlucky” genes. The problem is that, compared to their older sibling, they grew in a relatively undernourished environment in utero.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Why does being born second sometimes mean a child’s body is second rate? For one thing, most American women have no idea how badly they’re eating. One study shows that overall, 74 percent of women “are falling short on nutrients from their diet.” 123 And I think even that number is optimistic (see the statistics in Chapter 3 and more below). If most mothers-to-be aren’t even taking in enough nutrients for themselves, how can we expect them to properly provide for a growing baby, not to mention one right after the other? But the biggest reason there’s often such a difference between number one and number two in cases of rapid-fire conception has to do with how the placenta works.
Even minor nutritional deficiencies can hamper baby’s growth. So to better protect baby, nature has provided a built-in safety mechanism, allocating as many resources to the placenta as it can get away with, even if it means putting mom’s health at some risk. The baby-protection mechanism is so powerful that even on an all-McDonald’s diet, a woman can expect to produce a baby with ten fingers and ten toes. Dr. John Durnin, of Glasgow University, describes the mechanism vividly: “The fetus is well protected against maternal malnutrition—that indeed it behaves like a parasite oblivious to the health of its host.”124 If mom’s diet is deficient in calcium, it will be robbed from her bones. If deficient in brain-building fats—as horrible as this sounds—the fats that make up the mother’s own brain will be sought out and extracted.125 Pregnancy drains a woman’s body of a wide variety of vitamins, minerals, and other raw materials, and breastfeeding demands more still. As you might expect, the demands of producing a baby draw down maternal stores of a spectrum of nutrients, including iron, folate, calcium, potassium, vitamin D, vitamin A and carotenoids, magnesium, iodine, omega-3, phosphorus, zinc, DHA and other essential fatty acids, B12 and selenium.126 To the placenta, mom’s central nervous system, for instance, is simply a warehouse full of the kinds of fat needed to build baby’s central nervous system. Studies show that maternal brains can actually shrink, primarily in the hippocampal and temporal lobe areas, which control short-term memory and emotion.127 These brain regions are not responsible for basic functioning, like breathing or blood-pressure regulation, and so are relatively expendable. This marvelous nutrient-scavenging ability of a human placenta means that even in conditions of insufficient maternal nutrition the first child may come out relatively intact. Meanwhile, mom’s body may be depleted to the point that before and after pictures reveal her spine to have curved, her lips thinned, and she may have trouble remembering and learning new things, or feel anxious and depressed—as in postpartum depression.
NUMBER ONE SON—WHY SO LUCKY?
On the left is Matt Dillon, who has been starring in movies since his teens. On the right, the incredibly talented Kevin Dillon, eighteen months his junior. Both men were forty-three when photographed. Why does Kevin look older, and why has he rarely been cast as a romantic lead? The answer: The Sibling Symmetry Shift.
It may sound harsh, but it’s just the “selfish” gene at work. Successful genes behave like greedy pirates, commandeering maternal nutrient stores for the benefit of their own optimal replication. However, any child conceived in too short a time for those storehouses to be refilled will be at significant disadvantage. In such depleted conditions, were baby to extract from mother all the nutrients its genes would like it to have, this would put mom’s life at significant risk. Following the utilitarian calculus of genetic survival, biology pragmatically chooses not to kill the mother while a baby is gestating and opts, instead, for a compromise. This second baby will be constructed as well as possible in the depleted conditions in order that mom may pull through. Tragically, this exposes the child to a variety of health problems, which can become increasingly noticeable, and even debilitating, as they grow older.
Here’s something else to consider. Sugar and vegetable oils act like chemical static that blocks the signals our bodies need to run our metabolisms smoothly.128 Most women’s diets today are high in sugar and vegetable oils, adding to the growth disturbances already caused by missing nutrients. Not only does sugar and vegetable oil consumption disrupt maternal metabolism and lead to gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and other complications of pregnancy, the sugar and vegetable oils streaming through a developing baby’s blood block signals in the womb, disrupting the sequence of highly sensitive, interdependent developmental events that contribute to the miracle of a healthy birth.129, 130
The consequences of not getting enough nutrients and the introduction of toxins are primarily brought to bear through changes in the infant’s epigenome. As we saw in Chapter 2, the epigenome consists of the set of molecules that attach themselves to DNA and other nuclear materials that control when a given gene is turned on or off. These genetic switches inform every aspect of our physiologic function. Diseases previously assumed to be due to permanent mutation—from cancer, to diabetes, to asthma, and even obesity—most often actually result from mistimed genetic expression. And since the proper timing of gene expression requires specific nutrients in specific concentrations, if a second sibling gestates in a lessor nutritional environment than the first, their epigenetic expression will be suboptimal, and growth and development will be impaired. We know, for example, that low birth weight, often due to mom’s smoking or high blood pressure (both associated with poor nutrition), puts children at risk for low bone mass and relative obesity for the rest of their lives.131 Abnormal epigenetic responses due to nutrient deficiency may explain why children of subsequent births are at higher risk for disease, from cancer132 to diabetes133 to low IQ and birth defects.134
Our skeletal development depends on normal genetic expression, too. Because normal facial growth demands large quantities of vitamins and minerals, and short inter-pregnancy intervals make it unlikely that mom’s body would have been given adequate time to replenish all the vitamins and minerals the first baby used up,135, 136 children born in close succession might reasonably be expected to look different. Previous studies have shown that births less than eighteen months apart increase child mortality and, in some cases, stunt growth.137, 138 One group of authors’ speculation that “a shorter period between births may reduce the ability of the mother to replenish her reserves adequately for this purpose”139 supports the idea that mom’s nutritional health plays an under-appreciated role in baby’s ultimate health. But I could find no studies addressing the potentially life-changing influences of birth order on facial development. So I designed one myself.
How Birth Order Affects Our Looks
I began by looking to the stars—TV and movie stars, that is. A glitterati’s face is loaded with instances of that special kind of symmetry discussed in the last chapter, called dynamic symmetry, which we recognize by instinct. The actor with “screen appeal,” the actress with “that certain something,” the up-and-coming journalist groomed for the anchor seat because of her “fresh” face, the photogenic author with the winsome smile—what we’re really talking about here is geometry. Our brains are exquisitely sensitive pattern detectors, capable of assessing the architecture of a human face with NASA-like precision. And as NASA was reminded with Hubble, a hair’s breadth can make all the difference. Deviations of just a millimeter from the ideal create features that fail to align perfectly with Marquardt’s Mask, and we can take all this information in instantaneously. We prefer to fix our gaze on faces with broad foreheads balanced by strong jaws, prominent brows above deep-set eyes framed with nice, high cheekbones—those are the characteristics that tend to bend the angles of the human face toward a more perfect proportionality. As you might have guessed, models and movie stars from Greta Garbo to Angelina Jolie have a habit of hoarding more than their share of dynamic symmetry. And often they are the first born of their family.
In contrast, their younger siblings’ faces are often noticeably less symmetrical. Most are characterized by a narrowing of the mid-portion of the face, rounded, indistinct features including noses, cheekbones, and brows, and a weakening of the chin and jaw. Are A-list movie stars always the oldest child in the family? Certainly not, since we’re talking about nutrition and nutrition is something that many women can, and often do, take conscious action to improve. But proper nutritional refortification requires time, and I believe this is why those who had older siblings typically had three or more years spaced between them. (Every rule has its exception and Tom Cruise is a notable example.)
Of course, superstar looks are rare (in the modernized world), and the chance for any family to produce even one child of stellar beauty is small. The statistical improbability of one stunner following on the heels of another would predict, with rare exception, any consecutive child to be less attractive than the first regardless of how effectively mom can replenish her nutritional warehouse with baby-building supplies. This would explain a fair, though miserly, rationing of young stars and starlets throughout the general population, but it would fail to account for the fact that the most attractive, most successful siblings are most often the oldest or, in families of three or more, one of the first two. It seemed to me that better nutrition was the simplest, most likely explanation for first-born children with favorable looks, and that a relative short supply of nutrients for subsequent siblings was potentially impairing their growth. But before exploring that further, I first wanted to see if the second sibling phenomenon could be found not just among the supermodels of society but also among the rest of us in the general population.
DIFFERENT GEOMETRY
Paris Hilton (left, born 1982) and Nicky Hilton (right, born 1983). Both girls are lovely, however one’s fame far outshines the other’s. Arrows shown indicate two of the features that differentiate these attractive women. Gray arrows indicate the corner of the mandible (lower jawbone) called the gonion. Paris has a nearly 90-degree angle within the bone structure of her mandible, while Nicky’s is more oblique and her gonion is located much closer to her ear, indicating a smaller, relatively underdeveloped jawbone. White arrows indicate the inflection point of the eyebrow. Paris’s eyebrow is angulated, while Nicky’s eyebrow is simply curved, indicating less angular orbital bones. Subtle nutritional deficiencies create subtle growth imperfections of the underlying bone. You can find similar tendencies of facial narrowing and midface underdevelopment (termed retrusion) in younger siblings of many celebrity families including Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, Penelope and Monica Cruz, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe Kardashian, Zooey and Emily Deschanel, Vanessa and Stella Hudgens, Nicole and Antonia Kidman.
So I expanded my research. With the generous help of office mates, patients who supplied stacks of high school yearbooks from 1969 to 2006, and graduate students from the University of Hawaii, I compiled nearly four hundred groups of siblings, over a thousand faces, cutting and pasting their senior photos (to control for age), organizing them in family groups—some large, some small. To be included in the study, families needed to have at least two siblings born within two years of each other. Just as with the celebrity siblings, among those pictured in the yearbooks, family beauty generally faded according to the same pattern. From oldest to youngest, the jaw grew narrower and receded, the cheekbones flattened out, and the eyes were less deeply set. The closer in age the siblings, the more striking the changes. Unfortunately, birth spacing alone does not prevent this effect. With anything short of an optimal dietary context, if mom’s body is asked to produce large numbers of children, then each subsequent baby uses up more of her reserves so that, even with three to four years between births, her body continues to lose nutritional ground. This can magnify the effects of developmental inequalities down the line.
What all these subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—rearrangements of the facial features amount to is a loss of dynamic symmetry which, for reasons that have as much to do with health and function as they do with looks, is unlikely to be associated with improvement in quality of life. This may make it seem as though first-born babies have all the advantages. But when we’re talking about a baby growing inside mom on a less-than-ideal diet, going first to get a better shot at being more dynamically symmetrical can actually come at a price.
THE SIBLING SYMMETRY SHIFT
In the last chapter, I discussed two distinct kinds of symmetry, biradial (left to right) and dynamic (based on phi proportions).
My examination of the high-school seniors’ faces uncovered two unexpected patterns. First, though the first-born exhibited dynamic symmetry, they had less biradial symmetry, which is to say the right half of the face was not a perfect mirror image of the left. Second, the second-born siblings seemed to exhibit the effects of heightened hormonal receptivity.
The first-born might have one eye bigger than the other, or a slightly rotated jaw that ever so subtly torques their smile. One half of the face might be slightly larger than the other. After this discovery I started checking my patients with Temporomandibular Joint Pain (TMJ, or jaw joint pain) for this asymmetry and found it, most often in those with the most long-standing symptoms. At least in my small sample size of several dozen, these patients were usually the first-born children.
As it turns out, the medical literature is peppered with reports of biradial asymmetries occurring more often in first-born children: leg length discrepancy,140 congenital hip dysplasia,141 scoliosis,142 plagiocephaly (flattening on one side of the skull),143 facial asymmetry including flattening of one cheek with prominence of the other,144 and left-right asymmetries of the jaw.145, 146 The authors of such articles generally suggest a link between these disruptions in biradial symmetry and “uterine crowding”—a simple lack of adequate space.147
As I see it, we are witnessing two distinct patterns of symmetry disruption, one occurring in first-born children attributable to insufficient uterine expansion, and the other occurring in subsequent children attributable to inadequate nutrition. The problem of inadequate space correlates with a loss of biradial (left-right) symmetry, while the problem of inadequate nutrition correlates with a loss of dynamic symmetry (parts losing their ideal relative proportion).
We’ve already discussed a potential explanation for relative nutritional deficits in later-born children being simple resource depletion and an inadequate period of time to allow the replenishing of mom’s nutritional reservoir. What could be the cause of inadequate uterine growth? This, I believe, has to do with hormones.
The more extreme version of a lack of uterine space is called intra-uterine growth retardation, and refers to a fetus that has failed to achieve its genetically determined growth potential. It affects between 5 and 10 percent of pregnancies, most commonly in smokers.148 Affected newborns suffer lung problems, potentially serious bleeding, and a host of other life-threatening issues. Long-term consequences include cerebral palsy, developmental delay, and behavioral dysfunction.149 Researchers are recognizing the role of chemical interference from oxidation in disrupting the normal responsiveness of the uterus to hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and more.150, 151 As we’ll see in later chapters, two foods that most powerfully promote oxidative stress are vegetable oils and sugar. In other words, too much vegetable oil and sugar in mom’s diet create chemical interference, delaying signal transmission between mom’s body and her own uterus. This type of symmetry shift is most pronounced in the first pregnancy due to the fact that, by the second pregnancy, the uterus has been prepped by the first, which is why the second delivery typically goes faster.
It’s important to keep in mind that very few of us are perfectly biradially symmetrical, and that minor differences in leg length, for example, should not be considered a matter of great concern. It is only when the asymmetry is pronounced that it is likely to lead to significant musculoskeletal issues down the road.
There is however one situation in which the human body is pushed to such extremes, and the loads that are communicated through the kinetic chain generate such powerful forces that, over time, even relatively nominal asymmetries can potentially pose a problem. Here, I’m talking about serious athletes, both professional and amateur. Because these subtle asymmetries can leave an athlete susceptible to repetitive motion injuries or changes in gait and movement, athletic trainer Timothy DiFrancesco of the L.A. Lakers includes symmetry analysis when sizing up a potential recruit: “Performance specialists in the NBA and elsewhere are always looking for the most valid and reliable ways to assess musculoskeletal asymmetry levels. This helps give critical insight into injury susceptibility and an athlete’s ability to withstand the rigors of the sport.”
BIRADIAL SYMMETRY CAN BE A PAIN IN THE NECK
Asymmetry leads to compensation throughout the skeleton. When the skeleton is just standing there, you can imagine the forces of gravity causing pain. Now imagine the skeleton doing something really athletic. You don’t have to a be a world-class trainer to imagine this degree of symmetry could cause a person pain. The kinds of discrepancies people like Tim DiFrancesco are looking for are of course far more subtle—partly because if they weren’t, the athlete would not likely have made it to elite sports.
I’d like to introduce one additional twist on the Sibling Symmetry Shift. I discovered that some second-born females have fuller lips and more sexually appropriate chins and eyebrows than their older siblings—a woman’s chin being a little more pointed and less squared than a man’s, and a woman’s eyebrows being more arched while a man’s are lower and straighter. The pointier female chin and gracefully curved eyebrows are examples of sexual dimorphism, the differential development between males and females (introduced in Chapter 4). Human males, in addition to strong, squared chins, tend to have broad shoulders, while women, along with more petite and rounded chins, have slender shoulders, narrow rib cages, wider hips, and fatty breast tissue. So what would explain these second-born girls with the more attractive, sex-specific features?
A woman’s body undergoes a miraculous change soon after conception. Under the influence of a new physiologic directive, the functioning of every organ is altered by waves of hormones, all generated by the tiny collection of rapidly dividing cells. Many of these changes are permanent. Of course, no organ is affected more obviously than the uterus. But a modern diet interferes with hormonal signaling, as we’ll see later, so the uterus, in particular, can’t perform quite so well, at least not at first. Blunted uterine (and placental) estrogen signals could explain why estrogen’s effects on a first baby girl often appear diminished. A subdued response to estrogen can lead to relatively masculine features: slightly too prominent brow and chin, aggressive-looking eyebrows, and lips not quite filled out. She may be handsome, but she won’t turn heads. With mom’s uterine infrastructure already built out by the second pregnancy, the same level of estrogen produces a more potent response. Incidentally, if the second sibling were a boy, the burst of estrogen receptivity might still create a feminizing effect, sharpening the center of the chin, arching the eyebrows, rounding the forehead, and plumping the lips.
So what does this mean? For one thing, although the development of a beautiful, healthy baby is—as we are so fond of saying—miraculous, it is not a mystery. This spectacular orchestration of events is as dependent upon a strict total adherence to a program of good nutrition as it is vulnerable to its breach. Studying siblings enables us to see why we aren’t all perfect, and allows us to witness how nutrient deficits change a child’s growth in ways that are both predictable and easy to measure.
I call it the Sibling Symmetry Shift because the subtle effects of maternal malnutrition on a child’s growth are most readily discernable in the faces of children born in a short time period after an older sibling who, presumably, shares similar genes and thus serves as a kind of control. But as I just described, no child, not even an only child, is immune from symmetry shifts because the underlying problem is not birth order; it’s malnutrition. While a first baby grows in mother’s womb, static interference from dietary sugar and vegetable oils too often disrupts hormonal communication between placenta, uterus, and ovaries, delaying uterine development and reducing physical space for the baby while tending to blunt the child’s potential for sexual dimorphism. In a woman’s subsequent children, the cellular circuits necessary to coordinate the various baby-making stations (uterus, placenta, etc.) have already been optimized, enabling faster uterine responses (such as quicker growth and speedier deliveries), which permits greater biradial symmetry, and primes the baby’s potential for sexual differentiation. But in the context of a modern diet, the cost of going second (particularly with close birth intervals) is often relative maternal nutrient deficiencies that result in relatively less material to build bone, nerve, and so on, thinning and flattening facial features to create a worn-down look.
In Chapter 3, we saw that the vast majority of Americans—and I mean just about everyone—aren’t merely malnourished, but severely malnourished. Which should make you wonder: Doesn’t that mean we’re all suffering from some degree of symmetry shifts? Most of us are, which is why there seems to be so few genetic lottery winners walking around. And what explains them? How did they, raised by parents who, presumably, followed the same advice my parents did, and ate the same steady diet of frozen, canned, and vitamin-poor fruits and vegetables, mystery meat from poisoned animals, grains grown on mineral-depleted soils, margarine, and everything else that makes our modern diet unhealthy, curry Mother Nature’s favor? They didn’t. Their great-great-grandparents did, by eating such nutrient-rich diets that they imparted the family epigenome with genetic momentum, the ability of genes to perform well with suboptimal nutrient inputs for a finite amount of time. And their placentas did, by sending an especially urgent message to mother’s bones, brain, skin, muscles, glands, and organs, to release every available raw material for the benefit of the baby. In these one-in-a-million cases, the fetal genome operating in mom’s belly can do what it’s been doing for a hundred thousand years: create the miracle of a perfectly symmetrical Homo sapien baby.
I should be clear that my investigation into the relationships between symmetry shifts and birth order and timing barely scratches the surface. I certainly don’t mean to suggest, by introducing my observations, that we can find this pattern in every family without exception. Rather, I’m describing a tendency that I think bears consideration. Nor do I mean to suggest that parents are to blame when congenital malformations affect their children. My hope is that this kind of information will help us do away with the idea that baby-making is simply too formidable or mysterious a task to try to optimize and that we might as well just throw our hands in the air and attribute life-changing symmetry shifts to factors entirely beyond our control.
I believe that we can offer moms solid information to more effectively incentivize their adherence to a healthy diet. What moms need, what they want, is a strategy. A strategy that can help ensure that when their bodies are called upon to engage in the serious project of creating a healthy baby they are nutritionally prepared to allow all those interacting growth-directing systems to join in a coordinated effort. And the proliferation of mommy chat rooms and advice-sharing platforms proves that millions of mothers-to-be are already well aware of the profound impact of nutrition and hungry for the best advice. Given the increase in birth defects, autism, child asthma, child depression, child cancer, and so on that I’ve observed in the decades since my graduation, years ago I began to suspect that the current strategy—the one recommended by the experts moms most often listen to—has proven to be an epic failure. Nevertheless, I’d sorely underestimated the barriers to disseminating better, more effective child-health–fortifying information by way of the medical establishment.
HOW CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE LETS MOTHERS DOWN
Doctors get their information from researchers. Researchers can only do research when they can get grant funding. These days, grants come from industry or special interest groups, and tend to support either the use of expensive medications and technology or a demand for more medical coverage for one of many special interest groups. Few physicians are naive to these realities. But I hadn’t fully appreciated the extent to which research must fall into one of these two categories to be funded until I met with researchers at UCLA and UCSF to discuss the possibility that there might be an obvious, though currently overlooked, relationship between modern food and disease.
The trip was a real eye-opener. These researchers held fast to the idea that their primary directive was improving human health. But it soon became clear that their more immediate goal, by virtue of the realities of economics, was the acquisition of grant funds, necessitating a never-ending sequence of compromises between the exigencies of financing and the integrity of the science. I learned from an epidemiologist that various agricultural interests funded most of his research in nutrition, and out of financial necessity, he was directed toward the promotion of the largest crops: fruits.152 As an epidemiologist, he was unaware that excess fruit consumption leads to health problems due to the high sugar-to-nutrient ratio in fruit. And he was surprised when a colleague pointed out that she’d found, after advising her patients to eat the recommended three to six servings of fruit a day, that doing so raised their triglycerides to unhealthy levels.153 Hoping to drive home the point that our bodies demand more nutrition than we can get from fruits, vegetables, grains, and low-fat meat, and hoping to stir up interest in doing more research on nutrition and optimal fetal and facial development, I described the results of a pertinent study. It showed that one in three pregnant women consuming what mainstream research suggests would be a healthy diet nevertheless gave birth to babies with dangerously low levels of vitamin A in their blood.154 Vitamin A deficiency is associated with eye, skeleton, and organ defects. The epidemiologist was fascinated but admitted that his reliance on funding from fruit growers bound him to continue producing more and more research just like he’d already produced—showing that fruits are “good for us.” I learned that neither he nor anyone else at UCLA would likely be able to pursue this new nutritional issue or anything similar because there was no giant industry to support it.
Ironically, another researcher at UCLA was examining the so-called Hispanic paradox, a term referring to the mysterious finding that recent immigrants from Latin American countries (with a more intimate connection to the products of a traditional diet) have healthier babies than their Caucasian counterparts. Might the mystery be explained by the fact that our Mexican, South American, and other Latin-nation friends are still benefiting from their healthier, homeland diet? The physician I spoke to said that while my argument was plausible, he had not considered the possibility. However, he considered it unlikely that superior Hispanic nutrition was the reason for superior Hispanic maternal-child health. His idea was that Hispanics enjoy a greater network of social supports (in spite of the fact that many have immigrated to this country from thousands of miles away, which fractures families). And he felt that somehow social supports translated into fewer premature births and birth defects. In his publications, he points out that networks of social support are reinforced by community medical clinics. Where did his money come from? State-funded grants for medical clinics serving Hispanic immigrants. I left UCLA impressed by the spirit of optimism but demoralized by the misdirection of its pursuits and the sheer volume of intellectual and financial capital expended on generating the logical contortions necessary to earn funding from various state and industrial entities.
Hoping to find greener pastures elsewhere, I traveled north to speak to a perinatology expert at UCSF. There, I was thrilled to meet with an M.D./Ph.D. with a special interest in prenatal health. We discussed the pattern of facial changes I saw in younger siblings and their implications for improving maternal nutrition. Once again, I was taken aback. The well-respected researcher agreed that there was a relationship between nutrient depletion and skeletal development, but she was unconvinced that the pattern of skeletal changes could be due to anything other than chance. In her view, which reflected the general attitude I found at UCSF, it was unlikely that children born in the United States, let alone in the relatively affluent Bay Area, could be exposed to any significant levels of deficiency. Why not? “Because,” she explained, “pretty much every pregnant woman is given a prenatal vitamin.”
And that’s true. Obstetricians and primary care doctors like me routinely write prescriptions for prenatal vitamins to help reduce a woman’s risk of pre-eclampsia (an immune system disease causing mother’s body to partially reject the baby and give birth prematurely) and to decrease the child’s risk of low birth weight and neural tube defects like spina bifida. However, a large study completed in the United States showed that pregnant women using their prenatal pills still develop “combination deficits” of niacin, thiamin, and vitamins A, B6, and B12 that persist throughout each of the three trimesters.155 Other studies show that prenatal vitamin pills don’t solve many nutritional problems. The following are just a few examples:
Vitamin D Deficiency: In studies in which over 90 percent of participants took prenatal vitamins, 56 percent of white babies and 46 percent of black babies were vitamin D insufficient. Insufficiency in early life increases the risk of schizophrenia, diabetes, and skeletal disease.156
Long Chain Essential Fatty Acids: As of the date of this writing, there is no recommendation about how much of these to consume, and most people who don’t supplement get almost none. But supplementing with cod liver oil during pregnancy has protective and lasting effects on the baby’s intelligence.157
Choline: Gestational deficiency of choline is associated with lifelong learning deficits.158 One survey showed 86 percent of college-age women were lacking adequate dietary choline.159 Choline is not part of any prenatal vitamin supplement commonly marketed in the United States.
While the prenatal pill partially addresses the issue of nutrient deficiency, it does nothing to address the overconsumption of sugar and vegetable oil, both of which interfere with signal transmission required for normal growth and development.
The sad truth is that many, if not most, of the best minds in the research business are satisfied with the status quo. There appears to be very little sense of urgency in the prevention of unnecessary suffering from physiologic default or disease, and little humility brought to the reality that, in the battle against common childhood and adult diseases, medical research has by any objective account failed miserably. We are told to accept the idea that facial deformities—even relatively minor changes like those I study—occur randomly, all products of the whimsical nature of the “genetic lottery.” There was a time when the facial deformities now known to be associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) were written off as unpreventable.160 Doctors went on telling their pregnant patients to drink to settle their nerves. And there was a time when the spinal cord and brain malformations we now prescribe prenatal pills to prevent were believed to occur by chance. That changed in 1991, when The Lancet published an article entitled, “Prevention of Neural Tube Defects.” 161 Provided with unambiguous evidence that folic acid deficiency played a role and that better nutrition could prevent problems like spina bifida, physicians ultimately adopted measures of prevention. We are all served by science’s affinity for explanations to natural phenomena. Without it, we are guided only by magical thinking and superstition. The witches of Salem weren’t possessed; they were poisoned.162 Hurricanes aren’t retribution for sinful behavior; they are explicable meteorological phenomena. Likewise, physiologic deficiencies occur for a reason and most can be easily prevented.
FETAL ALCOHOL SYNDROME
This picture shows the characteristics of FAS. As with The Second Sibling Symmetry Shift, we find tall, narrow skulls, minor ear anomalies, small jaws, thinned lips, and flattened cheekbones. Alcohol’s toxic effects occur largely due to cellular membrane damage. Sugar and toxic fats also damage cell membranes (see chapters 8 and 9). Either mechanism would be expected to block signal transmission and thus impair growth.
I’m sorry to say that such professional complacency is increasingly common in medicine. Although we tell pregnant patients to quit smoking and drinking and to take their prenatal pills, and we screen for certain diseases, the list of childhood epidemics keeps stacking up. That’s a tragedy. But for the most part, we physicians simply go about our business assuming someone else will someday do something about it.
This apathy toward prenatal care has affected the way the general public thinks, as well. I brought up the prenatal pill earlier, so let’s look at that as one example. A woman recently came to see me already seven weeks pregnant with her third baby in less than three years. Most women have no idea that the prenatal vitamin pill works best when taken before conception because it helps to boost a woman’s vitamin levels to prepare for the first ten weeks of pregnancy, the time when the most fundamental decisions about how to shape the baby’s body are made. After that window of opportunity has shut, though it can still improve birth weight, the vitamin pill can do little to prevent most major birth defects.163 This mother’s third child will be at high risk not just for disfiguring facial changes but also for skeletal and organ defects which will likely turn him or her into another chronic disease statistic before graduating high school. Still, this is likely the first time you’ve heard this bit of information about prenatal vitamins, which tells us something about the dissemination of critical child development information in our country. (It might help if we called it a “pre-conception” pill.)
The young mother-to-be certainly had heard nothing of it, but it’s not her fault. Our society does not encourage strategizing to optimize a child’s health. The medical community is missing the opportunity to prepare mothers’ bodies with solid nutrition, giving their babies’ genes the materials they need to compose their physiologic masterpiece. Of course, that would involve more than taking a pill. It would require improving the nutrient content of mothers’ food.
Synthetic vitamin pills are, of course, a step up from no nutrition at all, but they are a sorry replacement for real food. First, they’re not the same as what nature makes. Many vitamins exist in nature as entire families of related molecules, only a few of which can be recreated in a factory. For example, there may be over 100 isomers of vitamin E, but only about 16 are put into tablets.164 Second, the processing of synthetic vitamins necessarily involves the creation of incidental molecular byproducts, the effects of which are largely unknown. About half of the content of vitamin E tablets are isomers that don’t exist in nature, which might explain why some studies show that taking synthetic vitamin E pills increases mortality. Third, without the proper carrier nutrients in the right balance, many vitamins are not absorbed. Fourth, many vitamins work synergistically with other nutrients in ways we don’t fully understand. Fifth, who knows what else is in that pill? The entire supplement industry is essentially unregulated, and supplements have been found to be contaminated with toxic compounds including lead or dangerously high levels of copper.165 But again, there is some benefit to taking certain supplements, especially in pregnancy, because the food supply is so bereft of nutrients when compared with foods from only seventy years ago.166, 167, 168
A real danger of the prenatal pill is its psychological effect, how it implies to mothers that the nutrition issue has been addressed and safely removed from their “to do” list. This prenatal vitamin pill, part of “advanced” prenatal care, is widely believed—by health professionals and patients alike—to make up for the fact that today’s modern diet is so wantonly lacking. The general idea is that, whatever our mom-on-the-go can’t provide to her baby through whatever she’s eating, the prenatal vitamin pill can, thus implicitly giving her permission to continue with the standard diet and expose her body to foods that could not be better engineered to deprive a growing child. In my practice, I give all pregnant women who see me a prescription for a prenatal multivitamin, but I make sure they know that it’s no magic bullet. If they want to have a healthy, beautiful baby, they have to learn how to eat (see Part Three: Living the Deep Nutrition Way).
Studies like those cited here, showing how poorly nourished we actually are, have presumably been conducted so that perinatologists and other specialists can familiarize themselves with, and begin to address, childhood disease and physiologic deficiencies that result from malnutrition. However, taking action based on what a given study recommends would require personal initiative on the part of individual healthcare providers. But as corporate culture goes, so goes medical culture. We live in the age of consensus and groupthink, where otherwise curious and capable professionals avoid being singled out by huddling in the center of the herd. The herd, in turn, waits for an authority figure to lead the way. So if there is no authority figure acknowledging the importance of a given article’s findings, nothing happens. It’s as though it were never written.
Long before any of today’s ivory towers had been built, and long before a diploma was proof of wisdom, people were making their own observations and drawing conclusions, acting on those conclusions, and passing that wisdom down to their children. Much of that accumulated knowledge pertained either directly or indirectly to the production of healthy babies, yet only a few scattered snippets still remain. These whispers from the past help explain how people used to avoid issues of Sibling Symmetry Shifts and the resulting health problems. And they can still help anyone hoping to become a parent, providing a framework for taking action to better ensure good fertility, a smooth pregnancy, and a healthy, beautiful child.
UNDER-DEVELOPED JAW IMPACTING AIRWAY
If I were to tell you that these two young men were twins and that, throughout their school years, one was relentlessly bullied while the other was his protector, which of the two would you peg as the victim and which as his defender? Studies show that the overwhelming majority of us make the very same kinds of character assessments based on facial structure that you probably made just now. In reality, these are before and after photos of one man who underwent surgery to restore his underdeveloped maxila and mandible to more optimal geometry. I include them here because renowned behavioral scientists, most notably Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, have shown how a lifetime of receiving such judgments begins with one’s parents and continues to influence face-to-face interactions every day of our lives. Though subtle, the cumulative effects shape our self-image and ambitions in ways that either impair or facilitate professional accomplishments. Parents who take diet seriously should take pride in their efforts to provide their children with the best chance of success in our highly competitive world.
THE TRADITIONAL STRATEGY FOR A HEALTHY PREGNANCY
A group of social workers studying access to healthcare in Africa in the 1970s were surprised to discover resistance to the building of more hospitals and clinics from—of all people—local village grandmothers. It’s not that these women didn’t care about health or feared new technology. They felt that the influx of Western ideas had already caused harm to their children and grandchildren. The new order smacked of an insidious form of imperialism. So when these independently minded African women were politely asked to relinquish their roles as protectors of the community genome, they bridled at the idea. As one member of the Batetela tribe in the Upper Congo River region explained it:
Today we don’t make any decisions about spacing the births of our children…. Our ancestors had stronger children because they were not born too close together. Today parents no longer worry about their children getting sick. They think that they can always buy medicine and then the child will get well. This is why couples no longer separate their beds after the birth of a child, as they used to do in the time of our ancestors.169
When social workers examined how these traditions eroded, they uncovered an explanation not entirely irrelevant to us: Westerners, including mine owners, state officials, missionaries, and doctors working with these groups, judged the traditional practice of spacing childbirth to be at odds with their long-term goals of expansion and did not support its continuation.170 “Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925” suggests rather provocatively that when companies need workers, they care more about sheer numbers than the quality of workers’ lives or their longevity.171 Such concerns become irrelevant given a large enough pool of potential workers to draw from. And so the systematic spacing of children that was once an “important feature of the control of excellence of child life”172 is tossed aside as an anachronism, a fractured artifact of female empowerment. But it is not just a women’s issue, and it extends beyond the political. We all gain from children’s good health, which requires giving mom’s body at least three—preferably four—years to refortify her tissues with a generous supply of nutrients.
Nearly a century ago, Mahatma Ghandi preached self-sufficiency as a prerequisite of self-government, reminding his countrymen that “to forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”173 Franklin Delano Roosevelt later echoed this principle, saying, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”174 Two of the most important resources we have are the land that provides us with food and the farmers who work it on our behalf. If the idea of refortifying a mother’s body between births and doing the same with soil between crop cycles strikes you as related concepts, you’re right. Just as we are all custodians of the genome, traditional farmers are the frontline custodians of the land, going to great lengths to replenish the ground between crops and to replace all the minerals required for healthy growth of the plants—even to the point of layering recycled outhouse waste over the ground to recapture nutrients that would otherwise become depleted. The modern technique is to replace only a few of the many nutrients crops draw from the ground each year. As a result, our food supply is of much lower quality now than it was before industrial farming, which in turn makes fortifying mom’s body a tougher task.
While the fact that we still produce bumper crops year after year makes for good press, in reality the nutrient content of American-grown plants and animals is far worse than it was during the dustbowls of the 1930s. Farmers call this the dilution effect—more pounds of produce from the same soil means less nutrition per pound of produce produced. One report showed that packs of sliced green beans have only 11 percent of the vitamin C claimed on the package.175 Another report comparing mineral levels of twenty-seven fruits and vegetables from 1930 and 1980 found modern produce to be depleted by an average of 20 percent, with calcium dropping 46 percent, magnesium 23 percent, iron 27 percent, and zinc 59 percent.176 Meat and dairy, which ultimately depend on healthy soil, have declined commensurately in quality between 1930 and 2002, with iron content in meat falling an average of 47 percent, 60 percent in milk, and lesser declines in calcium, copper, and magnesium.177, 178 When plants and animals are reared on mineral-deficient soil, not only are they missing nutrients, they’re not as healthy. And their cells are, in turn, less able to manufacture the vitamins and other nutrients that would benefit us. If we could somehow view these grocery staples as they now exist nutritionally, they would look like ghostly afterimages of their former selves, semi-transparent shapes of apples, cucumbers, the various cuts of beef. Of course, in real life it all looks relatively fresh and appetizing. It had better: most are grown and engineered with eye appeal in mind. These pretty displays hide the fact that it is more difficult to purchase nutritionally rich foods today than any time in recent history.
Without healthy soil to nourish them, plants are unable to use the energy from the sun to manufacture optimal levels of vitamins. Without vitamin- and mineral-rich plants for animals to eat, they can’t add the next layer of chemical/nutritional complexity we have evolved to depend on. We are here today because our ancestors taught their children how to garden, hunt, and prepare their food so that they could one day raise healthy children of their own. Their hard work and due diligence in building and maintaining a healthy environment to support a healthy human genome can, however, only take us so far. We are coasting along on the nutritional momentum left over from millennia of enacted nutritional and environmental wisdom. If our food is composed of far fewer nutrients than it was four generations ago, it’s a fair bet that our physiologies—our connective and nervous tissues, our immune systems, etc.—have taken a hit. What about our genes? Might they be affected as well? What might be the expected effect of generations of nutritional neglect on our own children?
That depends, in large part, on the choices each of us makes. But there is little doubt that physicians like me are going to be very, very busy.
THE OMEGA GENERATION
When I was living and working in Hawaii, four generations sometimes came in to my clinic for an office visit all at once, giving me a front-row view of the impact of modern food. Quite often, this is what I saw: great-grandma, born on her family’s farm and well into her eighties, still had clear vision and her own set of teeth. Her weathered skin sat atop features that looked as though they were chiseled from granite. More often than not, she was the healthiest of the bunch and had a thin medical chart to prove it. The youngest child, on the other hand, often presented symptoms of the whole set of modern diseases: attention deficit, asthma, skin disorders, and recurrent ear infections. Like many of today’s generation, one or more of his organs wasn’t put together quite right. Maybe there was a hole in his heart, or maybe he needed surgery to reposition the muscles around an eye. While the exact effects may be hard to predict, what is predictable, given the dwindling dietary nutrients and proliferation of toxic materials, is some kind of physiologic decline.
Within a given family, the earlier the abandonment of traditional foods for a diet of convenience, the more easily perceptible the decline. I’m thinking of one little boy in particular, the great-grandchild of one of Hawaii’s many wealthy missionary families who developed an ear infection during his visit to Kauai from another island. This little boy bore none of his great-grandmother’s striking facial geometry. His jaw was narrow, his nose blunted and thin, his eyes set too close, and his cheekbones were withdrawn behind plateaus of body fat. The lack of supporting bone under his eyes made his skin sag into bags, giving him a weary look. His ears were twisted, tilted, and protruded, and his ear canals were abnormally curved, predisposing him to recurring external ear infections.
Narrow face, thin bones, flattened features—sound familiar? This is a dynamic symmetry shift. The nature and degree was something I’d expect to see if he were child number three or four of siblings born in quick succession. But the young man sitting on my exam table was only the couple’s second child, and though mom had given herself a full four years between the two, it hadn’t protected his health. He was the fourth-generation product of a century of nutritional neglect and the consequential epigenetic damage. The last century has derailed our entire culture from the traditions that sustained us, so he is far from alone in enduring visible epigenetic damage. And the consequences impact more than a child’s skeletal system; his entire genome is at risk. I believe this is why, according to a landmark 2003 Center for Disease Control (CDC) report, this child, like all others born in 2000, had a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes, a condition that reduces life expectancy by between ten and twenty years.179 What is going unreported is the fact that it isn’t just diabetes on the warpath. Every year, growing battalions of familiar diseases are cutting a wider and wider swath of destruction through the normal experiences of childhood.180
THE REASON MEN SHOULD TAKE PREPARATION FOR PREGNANCY AS SERIOUSLY AS WOMEN
Healthy, high motility (left) versus less healthy, low motility sperm (right). Think of the project of making a healthy baby as a competition—because it is. This is a snapshot of what that competition looks like moments after the starting pistol goes off. Already, a survival of the fittest contest has been set in motion, and one winner from each of these two contests will be selected for advancement. Once they enter the world the two finalists will be pitted against all other surviving finalists in the lifelong battle for resources and opportunity.
Whereas in previous centuries part of a parent’s responsibility was to work hard to prevent their children from getting sick, today so many of us are sick ourselves that we’ve grown to accept disease as one of life’s inevitables—even for our children. Today’s kids aren’t healthy. But rather than make such a sweeping and terrifying declaration, we avert our eyes from the growing mound of evidence, fill the next set of prescriptions, and expand our definition of normal childhood health to encompass all manner of medical intervention. This latest generation of children has accumulated the epigenetic damage of at least the three previous generations due to lack of adequate nutrition along with the overconsumption of sugar and new artificial fats found in vegetable oils. The family genome has been getting battered relentlessly for almost a century—even during key, delicate periods of replication. The physiologic result of these accumulated genetic insults? Distorted cartilage, bone, brain, and other organ growth. Many physicians have noted an apparent increase in young couples complaining of problems with fertility which, given the implications of epigenetic science, should come as no surprise. Children born today, I’m afraid, may be so genomically compromised that, for many, reproduction will not be possible even with the benefit of high-tech medical prodding. This is why I call these children the Omega generation, referring to the last letter in the Greek alphabet.
SIX WAYS NUTRITION CAN OPTIMIZE YOUR CHILD’S GROWTH
1. Height. Pour more milk. A meta analysis concluded that for each additional 100 milliliters of milk (roughly 3.3 ounces) consumed daily, children grew an extra 0.2 centimeters (roughly 1/8 inch) per year.181 Children in the study were aged two to twenty and the study duration ranged from a few months to two years. The study’s authors noted that the growth effect was especially powerful in teens. It is not known if higher and sustained milk supplementation would have additive effects. But if avid milk drinker and NBA player Jeremy Lin is any example, at six-foot-three with five-foot-six parents, then perhaps it may.
2. Vision. Look for lots of variety. In a study of children between ages seven and ten, children who developed nearsightedness compared to children who did not consumed significantly less of a wide variety of nutrients: protein, fat, cholesterol, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin C, phosphorus, and iron.182 Of note, although the myopic children ate roughly 300 fewer calories, there was no difference between the two groups in several anatomic metrics: height, weight, or head circumference. This suggests that while normal height, weight, and head circumference are indications of sufficient nutritional intake they are not definitive indicators of optimal nutrition. It also suggests that the children with normal vision may have been more physically active.
3. Cognitive development. Skip starchy snacks. Nutrients shown to correlate most strongly with high IQ include vitamin E, omega-3, and iodine. Studies have shown that the higher a child’s vitamin E, the better their language and social skills.183 Similarly, the higher a newborn’s omega-3 (as measured in maternal umbilical cord blood) the higher that child’s IQ later in childhood.184 Additionally, cognition has been shown to be impaired by a “snacky pattern” of eating high-carb foods “characterized by foods that require minimum preparation such as potatoes and other starchy roots, salty snacks, sugar, preserves, and confectionery.”185 Presumably this effect is mediated through reduced nutrition-to-calorie ratio.
4. Life span. Beget big babies. Larger children, born to non-diabetic moms, have greater muscle mass, a higher resistance to diabetes and obesity, and longer telomeres (the part of the DNA that determines how many more divisions a cell can undergo, thus influencing cellular lifespan)—all known to be associated with longer life expectancy.186, 187
How to grow a big baby without developing gestational diabetes? Aside from being tall and well fed during your own childhood, we don’t know much about specific interventions to produce bigger babies. But we do know something about how to avoid having a too-small baby: don’t smoke, don’t conceive while you’re undernourished or underweight, and don’t restrict protein (i.e. if you’re vegan, you may need to supplement).
5. Immune system. Maximize microbes and micronutrients. Researchers at UC Davis found that individuals with subtle deficiencies of various micronutrients are more prone to develop a variety of common day-to-day infections and are more likely to have more severe infections with prolonged convalescence.188 Allergies, asthma, and auto-immune illnesses are more prevalent in children with reduced microbial gut flora diversity. Experts recommend breast feeding to optimize early gut flora development and are considering recommending soil-based probiotics.189, 190 Including fermented foods in a child’s diet and encouraging outdoor play would be my preferred methods of introducing immune-boosting probiotics.
6. Puberty. Avoid insulin resistance. Junk food consumption and being overweight are both associated with insulin resistance. Insulin resistance impacts boys and girls in different ways. For girls, it causes precocious puberty, so common today that we find breast development, typical of eleven-year-olds a generation ago, often occurring in seven-year-olds and, rarely, in three-year-olds.191 Aside from its detrimental psychological effects, precocious puberty typically reduces the child’s adult height. In boys, insulin resistance reduces testosterone levels. Low testosterone during puberty is associated with decreased development of muscle mass, impaired growth of the penis and testicles, reduced deepening of the voice, development of breast tissue, and lack of normal male hair growth.192
Born by cesarean section (often necessitated by maternal pelvic bone abnormalities), briefly breast-fed (if at all), weaned on foods with extended shelf lives—the human equivalent of pet foods—these Omega generation children see the doctor often and, whether first-born or not, will likely suffer from both biradial and dynamic symmetry shifts. In the same way we talk about bracing for the aging baby boomers’ medical needs, we had better reinforce the levees of our medical system for the next rising tide: medicine-dependent youth. These children will age faster, suffer emotional problems, and develop never-before-seen diseases. In my experience as a doctor, parents have an intuitive sense that their children are already dealing with more health problems than they ever did, and they worry about their future, for good reason. But no parent is helpless. If you have children, or are planning to, I can think of at least one child who can do something to avoid all this illness and start getting healthy—yours.
RESTORING YOUR FAMILY’S GENETIC WEALTH
If having an Omega generation baby sounds terrifying, you can do something about it. You can get off the sugar and vegetable oils that would block your child’s genetic potential. That means cutting out processed food, fast food, junk food, and soda. And you should give yourself at least three, preferably four, years between pregnancies and make every effort to fortify your body with vitamin-rich foods (or if you can’t, at least use prenatal vitamins) before conception. Those who want to do everything possible to have a healthy baby will find additional instruction throughout this book. But this discussion opens up a new question: If I do everything right, how beautiful and healthy can I expect my child to be?
My first answer to that question is that, of course, all children are beautiful. But if you’re asking if your child will have extraordinary health, excel scholastically and in sports, and be so physically striking as to elicit the envy of peers, then the answer is, It depends. It depends on how much genetic wealth you gave him. Which, in turn, depends on what you inherited from your parents.
Genetics is all about information. Your genetic wealth is a function of how much of the information in your genes has been damaged or remains intact, and how well the supportive epigenetic machinery is able to express the surviving data contained in your genetic code. To gauge the present condition of your genetic data, you can begin by asking your parents and grandparents what they ate when they were little. Find out if you were breastfed. Were they? Learn whatever you can about who was born when (including birth spacing). Dig up as many family pictures as you can find to look for the telltale signs of Second Sibling Syndrome. The more you know about your family history, and the more objectively you measure your health and appearance along with that of your partner, the more clues you will have to assess your genetic, and epigenetic, health.
Let’s give it a try. Let’s attempt to gauge a person’s genetic momentum using Claudia Schiffer as our case subject. Though both her parents were tall and reasonably attractive, you wouldn’t guess they could produce the superstar beauty they did. Their genetic equation was complicated by the fact that her father and mother were born during the Depression and raised under the conditions of post-war food shortages. Claudia’s secret weapon of genetic wealth may be that her great-great-grandmother grew up in the most wholesome and remote of farming communities in Austria, a town near Elbigenalp, which changed very little in the thousands of years before Claudia’s grandmother’s birth.193
This close relation to someone living in a successful, stable, indigenous society is truly a rare gift. Adding to this, Claudia’s father’s family was affluent, meaning that (during their formative years) he and his parents presumably had access to the best foods of the early twentieth century. Put the two together, and keep the good food coming, and—voilà—a genome operating under moderate duress for a spell is effectively rehabilitated.
SKELETAL RESPONSES TO DIET CHANGE
Short stature may be a kind of biologic “choice,” an epigenetic adaptation to inadequate bone-building material in a previous generation’s diet. Rather than build weak, breakable bones, the genome makes bone of the same strength, only less of it. When the nutrient supply increases, the genes respond again, taking advantage of the extra material to build a bigger frame.
Let’s look at a broader example of genetic rehabilitation, this time dealing with height. Height is one of the most desirable proportions for a man. Aside from the obvious social and mating advantages, the professional advantages gained with every additional inch of height are well documented. Studies show that tall men take home higher salaries, obtain leadership positions more often, and have more sex.194
Hawaiian archeological evidence shows that for hundreds of years a man’s stature helped to secure him a better official position in the class hierarchy. Our language—”big shoes to fill,” “big man on campus,” “someone you can look up to”—reflects society’s universal preference for the tall. The positive perception of the taller among us often extends to women, as well. I am not suggesting that taller people are better, only that height affords certain physical and social advantages. With that in mind, can relatively diminutive parents who want those advantages for their children have a baby who might someday walk tall and rise above the fray to stand head and shoulders above the rest?
Absolutely! This potential is encoded in our genetic memory. We’ve all heard that we used to be a lot shorter, how few of us could fit into one of those little suits of armor worn by medieval knights. But around the world, accumulating evidence suggests that thousands of years prior, our Paleolithic predecessors were at least as tall, if not taller, than most of us are today.195 Even in the early Middle Ages, 1,000 years ago, European men were nearly as tall as they are now. What caused the temporary skeletal shrinkage? As the population grew, crowding reduced access to nutrients until stature reached an all-time low in the early 1700s.196 Improvements in agricultural technology, most notably the series of inventions attributed to lawyer-turned-farmer Jethro Tull, revolutionized the process of tilling soil, vastly increasing productivity.197 By the late 1700s, having recovered some of its former nutritional inputs, the European genome rebounded—and with it the average European’s height. But it would probably have dipped again, so that a tall man today might measure just over five feet, were it not for the early twentieth-century invention of refrigeration. The ability to freeze food meant that fishermen could travel as far as they needed and fill their hulls to brimming. Refrigeration also meant that even during winter, wealthy countries could reach down to the tropics for summer fruits and vegetables, making it profitable for millions of acres of rain forests around the globe to be converted over to crop production. For the past 100 years, industrialized nations have had consistent access to enough nutrition to achieve our Paleolithically pre-programmed height. Of course, height doesn’t equal health. But generally speaking, when a genome has access to a surplus of complex nutrition, it is far better positioned—and may be said to have a built-in preference—for the production of offspring with more robust, larger frames.
The Sibling Strategy
So what is the strategy I recommend? As we’ve seen, optimizing a child’s growth involves optimizing nutrition in order to best assure the development of biradial and dynamic symmetry, as well as prime the child’s body for normal hormone responses in utero.
To optimize nutrition, we need to start eating the Human Diet, as outlined in Chapter 13. To facilitate normal in-utero hormone responses, we need to avoid the dietary substances that can interfere with hormone function, namely toxins. Later, we’ll learn more about how sugar and vegetable oils, the two most common toxins in the modern diet, prevent you from being as healthy and beautiful as you deserve to be, and how avoiding them can improve your own and your children’s health both immediately and in the long run.
Ideally, you will give yourself at least three months prior to conception to detox and refortify your system but I would recommend six to twelve months if you are prediabetic or overweight because both these conditions can involve profound metabolic and hormonal dysfunction and imbalance. If you are worried about your biologic clock, consider that by improving your nutrition you will not only facilitate faster conception when the time comes, you will also improve pituitary function, essentially reversing time in your baby-making systems.
Avoiding toxins seems like a pretty sound idea. But how, exactly, to do that? It gets confusing because a product can call itself healthy when there’s not enough nourishment in it to keep a rat alive. I’m not kidding. According to industry insider Paul Stitt, author of Fighting the Food Giants, a popular cereal company did a study in the 1940s that showed its puffed rice product killed rats faster than a starvation diet of water and minerals.198 Similar puffed and processed whole grain products are still sitting on store shelves today, sold under every major brand label. In fact, even store-bought granola, loaded with unhealthy oils and sugar, makes for an unhealthy way to start your day. Much better alternatives can be found in the fresh food departments, as we’ll see. To understand the depth to which our food supply is saturated with products that keep us barely alive, I’ll take us back in time to understand where and when things started to go wrong with the way we think about food.