Do you smoke cigarettes or even weed? Do you drink alcohol? Do you have an unbalanced diet? Would you change these unhealthy habits if you were pregnant, asks medical student Sahra Abdallah Haji. Beware of the consequences.

During pregnancy, anything you take into your body will actually also go into your baby. This is because many substances can cross the placenta from your blood into the baby’s blood, for example cigarette chemicals and caffeine.

Cigarettes, alcohol and poor diets during pregnancy cause biochemical imbalances. This can lead your unborn child to develop conditions in adulthood such as type 2 diabetes, stroke, hypertension, foetal alcohol syndrome, glucose intolerance, metabolic syndrome, asthma, cardiovascular disease and obesity among many other diseases. Many of these illnesses are chronic, meaning they may persist for a long time or recur.

Smoking

When you smoke, your baby smokes. Your baby also takes in the nicotine, carbon monoxide and tar, all poisonous substances. This causes your child to grow more slowly in the womb because he cannot get enough oxygen. Instead, these poisons reach and slowly suffocate the baby even before birth.

If the baby survives, he may be born prematurely with a lower-than-normal birth weight. From birth, your baby may have birth defects, breathing problems, behavioural issues and physical growth problems throughout life.

Birthweight less than 2.5kg is considered lower than normal. Babies born at low birthweights are usually pre-term, have serious health problems and suffer from an increased risk of long-term disabilities because their lungs do not fully develop.

Smoking during pregnancy will increase the chance of your baby developing childhood obesity by 50 per cent

Sadly, 40 to 45 per cent of low birthweight babies have brain bleeds which lead to developmental delays or learning difficulties or even permanent brain damage and death.

During World War II, there was famine in the Netherlands. As a consequence, women gave birth to smaller babies who had a higher chance of developing adult diabetes, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure.

In comparison with babies born with an average weight, those at low birthweights are 40 times more likely to die in their first month of life.

Smoking during pregnancy will also increase the chance of your baby developing childhood obesity by 50 per cent and triples the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Once the baby is born, it is important not to smoke around the baby or in the home due to second-hand and third-hand smoke, which is the cigarette smoke that sticks to your clothes, curtains, carpets, furniture and hair.

Smoking around your child will pollute the air he or she breathes in. Over time, the toxins build up in their tiny lungs causing long-term conditions such as asthma.

Cigarette toxins may also slow down the growth of your child’s developing brain. As a result, his brain will remain small, leading to learning difficulties and severe damage or mental retardation.

Caffeine

Adults love to drink coffee but it contains caffeine, which is both a stimulant and a diuretic. Besides keeping you awake, stimulants cause higher blood pressure and heart rate, while a diuretic makes you urinate frequently and can lead to dehydration.

Caffeine has the same effect on the child you are carrying as it does on you, but with worse results. A developing baby’s body cannot get rid of caffeine – it keeps the baby awake longer, changes its sleeping pattern and increases the heart rate and heart pressure to alarming levels.

Lastly, too much caffeine, that is more than 200mg a day, has been associated with an increased risk of miscarriage.

Alcohol

Alcohol is a teratogen, which means drinking alcohol during pregnancy causes birth defects. This increases the risk of the baby developing conditions such as alcohol foetal syndrome, congenital heart defects, cleft lip and cleft palate.

Diets

How does what I eat during pregnancy affect my child? How does it work?

The answer is epigenetics: when the genes are changed by external factors of the environment without it being an actual genetic mutation. It’s like a mobile phone that decides to change its own phone number without changing the SIM card. What we eat changes the genes in all our cells, including the sperm and egg cells, which explains why children also suffer.

It has been well-established that a mother’s diet, especially during early pregnancy, affects her children’s health and development. However, more recently, a Philippines study has also found that a mother’s diet during pregnancy may have an intergenerational effect on the birthweight and size of her future grandchildren.

Grandmothers who ate optimal nutritive and healthy foods during pregnancy, and also kept their daughters well fed during early childhood had grandchildren with healthier and heavy birthweights.

A common myth during pregnancy is that a mother must ‘eat for two’. In actual fact, it is not recommended that mothers increase their calorie intake until the third trimester (after six months). Even then, only an extra 200-300 calories per day is recommended, the equivalent of one slice of wholegrain bread and one tablespoon of peanut butter.

If a mother-to-be gains too much weight during her pregnancy, it increases the chance of her child being overweight by the age of three. It would also reduce the chances of a natural birth of the child, as it is known that overweight mothers are more likely to deliver their babies by Caesarean section. For the mother, the extra weight can lead to her suffering from gestational diabetes as well as back pain.

Another factor to consider in pregnancy is diabetes, when the mother either cannot produce enough insulin or her body does not respond to insulin. Therefore, her body cannot get rid of the sugar in the blood quickly.

Pregnancy itself can trigger gestational diabetes. This is a problem because too much sugar in the pregnant mother’s blood means too much sugar in the baby’s blood. As a result, the baby produces its own excess insulin, unnecessarily continuing to do so even after birth. This leads to the baby having very little sugar in the blood, a dangerous condition known as hypoglycaemia. Babies born to diabetic mothers also have a higher risk of respiratory distress syndrome, low calcium levels and being born with yellow skin (jaundice).

It is advised that all mothers take about 400μg daily of folic acid before pregnancy and during the first 12 weeks when the baby’s organs start to form. Folic acid, which is also known as vitamin B9, will allow your unborn baby to develop and grow properly. It also stops the baby from being born with an abnormal spinal cord. Although it will not fully protect the baby from the effects of cigarettes or a mother’s unbalanced diet, it will give her or him a fighting chance.

However, the best way to ensure good health of an in-utero baby is to go for early and regular prenatal care, and learn healthy habits months before conceiving.

Some facts and myths

By Ruth Marie Xuereb, midwife

• A healthy diet should be maintained throughout pregnancy and women should not succumb to the belief they are to “eat for two”. The recommended weight gain during pregnancy is 10 to 12.5kg.

• Eating raw or undercooked seafood is risky and should be avoided. If well cooked, seafood is beneficial as it is low in fat, high in proteins and rich in minerals. Any shellfish that do not open should be thrown away. Seafood should always be purchased from a reputable source.

• There are no known labour-inducing foods, not even spicy foods. As the cervix softens in preparation for labour, loose bowel movements may be experienced. Eating foods which may cause diarrhoea to induce labour does not work and if this proceeds after self-induced diarrhoea, it is probably coincidental.

•  Pregnant women may experience strange cravings such as for earth, coal or chalk. This is known as ‘pica’ and may indicate an iron deficiency. It should not be indulged and a doctor or midwife should be consulted.

• Pregnant women should avoid or limit intake of drinks containing caffeine as it interferes with the absorption of vitamins. This includes tea, coffee and carbonated drinks.

• Post-partum, one should adopt a realistic and healthy weight loss programme. Remember it takes nine months to put on the weight, so one should not expect to lose it in a few weeks.