no, seriously folks.
the matter that eventually becomes baby- is it mostly food digested during the day by the beautiful glowing mother, or does the food feed her and her stored resources make baby?
or a little bit of both?
danks,
jb
I think it has to be stored energy in the mother. All those Etheopians come to mind. I do not think the mothers eat much each day, but they make a lot of babies over there. If the baby was made from the daily intake of food, the fetus would take years to develope over there. Reminds me of people who take 10 years to build their dream house because they cannot afford all the supplies at once.
…Maybe…?
Well, if the mother does not produce enough insulin to digest all the carbs she eats, the baby gets bigger than it would otherwise, so it is at least partly what the mother eats and not just her tissue.
The baby gets 100% of it’s food, water and oxygen from the placenta, which is the interface between it’s bloodstream and the mother’s. So I would say that the baby is “built” from nutrients in the mother’s bloodstream. At that point, you get into the question of just how the mother’s bloodstream maintains the necessary load of glucose, amino acids and minerals.
Cell division. The sperm (23 chromosomes) fertilizes the egg (23 chromosomes), and the result is the zygote (46 chromosomes). After the zygote divides once, it’s called an embryo, and the cell division continues. Nine months of division and cell specialization later, you have a human baby.
I’ll try to find a web site that goes into more detail as far as describing mitosis (cell division) etc.
All the energy and matter HAS to go through the mother, unless someone has discovered an alternate digestive system in pregnant women that feeds directly into the fetus…
I think the OP is meant more as: How much of the baby comes from the mother’s stored resources vs. how much comes from food eaten after conception? Is that right, jb?
If that’s your question, I would have to guess that the mother doesn’t have enough stored resources to build the baby without massive additions of building blocks in food. It’s not like the mother usually wastes away while the baby grows; they usually grow together. The mother takes in a lot of food during pregnancy to provide proteins, fats, minerals, etc, and I’m nearly certain she doesn’t have enough to build a whole baby from scratch originally.
My mother lost her teeth after giving birth to me, They were rotten. I have heard that this is because she did not eat enough calcium and I needed it. I don’t know how much truth is in this.
lee It is true that if the expectant mother lacks sufficient calcium in her diet she will sacrifice it from her own stores. There is an old wive’s tale about losing a tooth for every baby. With modern diets, however, that is no longer the norm.
Some from what mom eats, some from what mom has stored. Baby will drain mom’s calcium if mom doesn’t eat enough.
The baby is a parasite in the sense that it will eat before the mom “eats”, taking what it needs from incoming food before mom absorbs what she needs. So a good portion of the baby is mom’s food.
So where does the stork come into the equation?
E equals M Ciconia squared.
the mother derives the babies matter directly from the velocity of a stork.
I suspect babies use whatever they can. They have dibs. Recently in a discussion on babies of malnourished mothers, it was postulated that mothers who have insufficient fat stores during pregnancy have a harder time making milk, in that the baby again has dibs. IOW, malnourished mothers make good milk. To make both good babies and good (healthy) mothers though, feed the mothers during pregnancy and afterwards.
All this is theoretical in the well fed (over-fed) Western world though.
hmmm… you do need to ensure that you take sufficient folic acid prior to pregnancy to prevent neural tube defects though.
There’s a great book that describes all this - “Life Before Birth - the Challenges of Fetal Development” by Peter Nathanielsz, MD/PhD.
The system is immensely complex, with not only the anticipated “placenta takes what is circulating in bloodstream” but also “placenta tells bloodstream to dump in loads of X” and “placenta forces increased gradient passage of Y, counter to osmosis”. So the baby takes what is circulating, AND takes from stores, as needed. It is a delicate and tricky dance, and as I discovered recently, one that can fail at any time (I miscarried on Weds, the fetus stopped developing at 5 weeks).
So, short answer, baby is developed from BOTH stores and current nutrition. There may be times when baby needs more than you are getting - in which case, mom’s body cannibalizes whatever it can, muscle, bone, even takes the cholesterol from mom’s brain if she isn’t making enough otherwise. You can basically starve and have a ‘normal’ child, though shortages of nutrition or oxygen at any time have consequences, most of them subtle, some of them drastic.
Read the book, it is worth the time. Utterly amazing how much is going on in there!
[The baby is a parasite in the sense …]
i’m not picking on you gigi, but i have heard this before and it makes me sick. you call it a parasite because it lives off it’s host. the site http://www.dictionary.com comes up with:
Biology. An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
using the above definition, I would argue that a baby ends us contributing to the long term survival of the host (and for that matter the survival of the species, maybe not at first, but that baby will become a child who will help out around the house and become a teenager who will borrow it car and return it with no gas (well maybe teenagers are parasites too), and eventially become a taxpayer to help support you in your old age.
Also is it possible for a parasite to infect it’s own kind?