Читать книгу You: Having a Baby: The Owner’s Manual to a Happy and Healthy Pregnancy - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 36

Some miracles come in the form of avoiding a natural disaster, and some come in the form of making a championship-winning shot. But we believe that one of the most miraculous processes in the human body (and there are many) is how a mother’s body interacts with a baby’s during pregnancy. That miracle centers around an organ that may elicit gasps of eeeeew from the weak-stomached men in your life: the placenta.

This amazing, essential, and delicate system of tissues plays a huge role in influencing the health of your child. How? The placenta delivers nutrients and oxygen to the growing fetus, removes carbon dioxide and other waste, and provides the fetus with its early immunities. As the physical interface between the fetus and the mother, the placenta is where you are most literally bonded to your baby.

The flip side of that beautiful bond is that everything you do—the vapors you inhale, the toxins you expose yourself to, the cucumber-and-cookie sandwich you crave—can be passed on to your child through that miraculous organ.

The placenta, as you’ll learn in this chapter, has one big job: to preserve and protect the fetus. Typically, it does a darn good job, especially when facing challenges shared by our pregnant Paleolithic ancestors, such as infections and natural toxins.

But the reality is that it’s not always equipped to handle all of the things that we’re seeing in today’s diets and environment. In this chapter, we’ll explain why and how you can take an active role in protecting your baby, starting right about now.