Download Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives AudioBook Free
What makes us just how we live? Some say its the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it's the environment we experience in youth. But could it be that many in our specific characteristics - our health, our brains, our temperaments - are affected by the conditions we experienced before birth? That is the claim of a thrilling and provocative field known as fetal origins. Within the last 20 years, researchers have been creating a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert prolonged effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a vibrant new view of pregnancy as an essential staging earth for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life. Writer and journalist Annie Murphy Paul projects into the laboratories of fetal research workers, interviews experts from round the world, and delves into the rich background of ideas about how exactly we're molded before beginning. She discovers remarkable reviews: how individuals gestated through the Nazi siege of Holland in World Conflict II are still feeling its implications generations later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their injury on to their offspring in the womb; what sort of lab accident resulted in the discovery of any common household chemical substance that could harm the growing fetus; the way the study of any century-old flu pandemic shows the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience. Origins also brings to light astonishing scientific studies: what sort of single contact with an environmental toxin may produce harm that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness gets their start in utero; why the womb is medicine's latest focus on for the promotion of lifelong health, from protecting against cancer to minimizing obesity.
