Expectant mothers should avoid smoking and alcohol, he says, as well as ensure they have the right balance of folate, B2 and B6 vitamins. The latter can help to reduce children’s risk of weight problems later in life, Albert says.
“[And] trying to have a healthy amount of weight gain while you’re pregnant and to screen for diabetes and, if it occurs, treat that – those things are all quite important.”
There are three windows likely to have a big impact on your child’s future health, he says: pre-conception, pregnancy and breastfeeding.
“The pre-conception period is probably a really important time to optimise your health,” Albert says, but it’s not necessarily about going to extremes.
In recent months, pre-conception – or “trimester zero” – has been trending, popularised by influencers trying to optimise their health to improve their chances of conceiving.
For some, this looks like eating well, exercising and checking you’re not deficient in any nutrients. For others, it can lean to the extreme: avoiding whole food groups, scented candles, nail polish or anything deemed toxic, or subscribing to elaborate supplement regimes.
But do we need to take such drastic measures? Albert says it’s more about maintaining general good health than making specific changes.
“That’s probably where our focus should be going.
“Ideally, going into your pregnancy with a healthy weight is important, if you can do that. Optimising some of these vitamins, making sure you’re not deficient, is important. But we don’t know all the answers to what you should be doing.”
Genes influence our health, too, Albert says. And while you can’t change them, what can change is how active they are in your child.
“All our genes have markers attached to them, [called] methylation. These markers make the genes a little bit more or a little bit less active, and we can pass that on to our children.”
Having diabetes or obesity can change those markers, which can influence how your child’s genes function as they grow.
How a father’s health can affect their children
“We know from studies of large populations of people that if you have a dad who was overweight, then you’re more likely as a child to have the same problems,” Albert says.
But he adds it’s not always clear if that’s down to the father’s physical health alone or the family’s health and lifestyle choices regarding food and exercise.
He cites recent research in which his team fed rats either a healthy diet or one consisting of more junk food-style diets.
“We found that when we gave the dads these junk food-style diets, the offspring developed problems with their weight as they grew up, and problems with how their metabolism worked,” Albert says.
“In that study, the dads didn’t do anything for their children apart from helping conceive them – there was no parental care from the dads. So because we know that all Dad provided was the sperm, there was a message in that sperm that set those babies off on a different path.”
Albert says that means the key window for a father to make changes to his health is likely within a few months of conceiving.
“That could be quite a small window of time to improve Dad’s health to have a really big impact on his children.”
While there’s an overwhelming amount of health advice for women trying to conceive, there’s much less for future dads – and Albert says that needs to change.
“In part, it’s because we don’t know exactly what they should do. But it’s striking that we haven’t really looked at that problem.
“The thing that I’m most interested and excited about for the future is answering the question of how should a dad optimise his health before he has a baby?”
It’s a critical question, he says, as roughly half of New Zealand men are obese or overweight.
“That means that half of children born in New Zealand are going to have a father who was in that situation. And so we really do need to know how all these people should optimise things for their children.”
Dr Ben Albert is giving a talk titled Setting baby on a healthy path: the influence of mum and dad on August 25 as part of the University of Auckland’s Raising the Bar event.
Bethany Reitsma is a lifestyle writer who has been with the NZ Herald since 2019. She specialises in all things health and wellbeing and is passionate about telling Kiwis’ real-life stories.
