While myths about pregnancy and food cravings abound, one thing is for sure: When you’re helping to build your baby’s cells and organs as well as your own, you have to be even more diligent about what you eat. The American College of Gynecologists only recommends gaining 25 to 35 pounds throughout your pregnancy if you’re already a healthy weight. And those pounds should come from vegetables, fruits, and high-quality protein, not ice cream and pickles.
Womb Dining Affects Later Health
Whatever you eat gets broken down into your digestive system and passed to your baby through your blood via the placenta and later the umbilical cord, too. Research has shown that if your baby doesn’t get the right nourishment in the womb, he could grow up to have chronic diseases.
Insufficient nourishment forces the developing fetus to divert nutrients from the kidneys, for instance, to be sure that the brain develops properly. Later, the child could be born with kidney problems and might even go on to develop diabetes.
Your Baby Eats From You, Too
Your baby doesn’t just rely on the foods you eat every day to build strong cells, bones, and organs. Your body actually breaks down your own muscle, bone, and fat stores that you’ve accumulated over your lifetime to ensure that your fetus has a continual supply of nutrients. So, if you were undernourished as a child or teenager, or have current nutritional imbalances, that affects your fetus, too.
Even as a fertilized egg travels down the fallopian tube to your uterus for implantation, it gets a sense of your body’s nutritional environment. It then uses that information to make decisions about how to distribute nutrients to the various developing organs and systems.
Baby’s First Servers: Placenta and Umbilical Cord
Your baby’s first source of food is the placenta. Baby and placenta both started out as something called a blastocyte. The inner blastocyte cells became the embryo, while the outer blastocyte cells filled with blood from your uterus. The embryo and placenta are connected by a little stalk surrounded by a primitive umbilical ring.
As your baby grows, the little stalk that connects it to the placenta also begins to grow and develops two arteries and a vein. When the fetus’s gastrointestinal system develops, it protrudes through the stalk, eventually forming the umbilical cord. Now you and the placenta feed your baby through his (someday) belly button!
Beyond Nutrition Toward Greater Health
The umbilical cord is your baby’s lifeline, conveying blood, oxygen, and nutrition to the developing fetus. In addition to being an important conduit, the cord itself is made of up amazing cells called stem cells that you can harvest at a later date by banking your baby’s umbilical cord after it’s tied off at delivery.
Stem cells banked at CellResearchCorp’s Global Cord Registry can be prompted to develop into other kinds of cells, including skin cells and organs, to help your baby and other family members in later years. Stem cells are used to heal wounds and burns and to treat chronic illnesses.
Make an informed choice. Select a cord banking service that is licensed to offer complete coverage for all stem cell therapies derived from your stored cord. Umbilical cord lining tissue banked by non-licensed cord blood banks may not provide the stem cell yield or quality that CellResearch Corporation’s proprietary and patented protocols can provide — this may affect its suitability for future therapeutic use. In addition, these blood banks and medical institutions that offer CellResearch Corporation's patented protocols — which include ALL cord lining stem cell therapies — are at risk of patent infringement. GlobalCord is operated by CellResearch Corporation and its partners. Cords banked through GlobalCord are covered by CellResearch Corporation’s patent licensure which extends to 41 territories around the world, including the U.S.A.