Mom’s Choices When We’re in the Womb Influences our Life Choices More Than We Think.

We last visited this subject 14 years ago. It turns out that our mom’s choices in diet, as well as her stress and anxiety, profoundly affect us and our brothers and sisters throughout our entire lives.

In a fascinating NYT op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristoff, At Risk From the Womb we find that our uterine environment is as important as our genetics and the outer environment we live in at various parts of our life. (Yes, the article is behind a firewall but occasionally they allow you a free read.)

From the article:

Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.

One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later. Scrawny babies were much more likely to suffer heart problems in middle age....

Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.

The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty....

One study in this field... looked at children who were born after the great flu pandemic of 1918. The pandemic lasted only about five months and infected about a third of pregnant women in America, so Mr. Almond compared those who had been exposed to it while inside their mothers with others born just before or after.

Ms. Paul quotes Mr. Almond as concluding, “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded.” They were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 15 percent more likely to be poor, and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease in old age.

Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through... a hormone released when a person is anxious.... children who were in utero during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 were more likely to have schizophrenia diagnosed as adults. And The (JAMA) reported that Chinese born during the terrible famine from 1959 to 1961 were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those born at other times.

As for obesity... British scientists who fed pregnant rats junk food: doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips and chocolate chip muffins (found) The offspring of those rats... were more likely to choose junk food when it was offered and ended up 25 percent fatter than rats whose mothers were fed regular rodent chow.

This field of “fetal origins” is still in its infancy, but one implication is that we should be much more careful about exposing pregnant women to toxins, and much quicker to regulate chemicals that are now widely used even though they’ve never even been tested for safety. Professor Agin is particularly eloquent about the potential perils of lead, dioxins, PCBs, radiation and pesticides.

If you can, please read the entire article if you want to know more about this incredibly important factor in human development. We are all seriously immersed in toxins of all kinds, and this makes it clear that the toxins our moms breathed, ate, and drank, as well as her emotional state, had a radical influence on us before we took our first breath, as well as our choices growing up as well as the choices we make as adults. It’s also clear that it is of major importance for us to eat, drink, and think as cleanly as possible, keeping our bodies, feelings, and minds as free of toxins as possible as we purify all we can to boost our physical, emotional, and mental health.

At this point, I’ll acknowledge that there are many examples of Beings who have transcended Earthly health and personality problems by surrendering to their Highest Self. They are exceptional Beings, of course, but still worthy reminders that Spirit is everything and matter the form of its expression.

Regardless of material circumstances, whether in or out of the womb, we can transcend many physical, emotional, and mental problems and become the living Light of our Highest Self. While we may still get sick and may even be sad on occasion, so have many Great Ones who contracted deadly diseases or died of one thing or another. And all truly great Teachers have known the deepest sorrows of the world more acutely than their followers or the mass of humanity. But though they experience pain, they do not suffer.

I remember learning the revolutionary idea many year ago that we are here to break the link between pain and suffering. Life is painful but we do not have to suffer. By our conscious choices to replace negative or unhelpful actions, feelings, and thoughts with positive productive ones, we transcend the negative elements in our environment and change the composition of these “bodies” so that the negatives are stilled and the positives are encouraged.

Our bodies replace all our cells every 7 years. By what we eat and drink, by our meditations and prayers, by our service to our Higher Self and humanity, we actively steer the process. These perpetuate or change our physical, emotional, and mental patterns, helping us know what is real and unreal, what is dark and what is light, and what leads us to the direct experience of our eternal Self.

Reprinted on crystalwind.ca with written permission from Robert Wilkinson. Copying this article to other blogs is strictly prohibited. It is copyright protected. 

© Copyright 2024 Robert Wilkinson

The original article is copyrighted by the author listed above. Posted on CrystalWind.ca ©2024. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this content is prohibited without written permission. The title of the article was created by CrystalWind.ca.

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