Eating fatty, fried foods is bad for you!
[Insert gasps of shock all around here.]
As a writer, I scour the headlines daily for new studies about pregnancy, and day after day, there seems to be yet another revealing study detailing what would appear to be some pretty common sense information.
Like this study, out of Harvard University of all places, which found that eating fried food on a daily basis doubles the risk of pregnant women developing gestational diabetes. What's that you say, Harvard researchers? Eating fried foods all day, every day is bad for you?
Call me crazy, but I'm just a little more than tired of these sorts of supposedly groundbreaking studies. They seem to go along the lines of revealing little-known facts like, smoking is bad for babies! Eating pure sugar out of your cupboard is linked to negative health outcomes! Drinking an entire keg with your fingers crossed before peeing on that pregnancy stick may lead to your baby having a bad test score in kindergarten!
Now, don't get me wrong — I'm all for increasing women's awareness about health during pregnancy, and as a former labor and delivery nurse, I've pretty much seen it all when it comes to the crazy things women will do when they're pregnant. It no longer shocks me that some women really do believe Mountain Dew is an appropriate substitution for water and that smoking just means a smaller baby and hey, that's a plus when it comes to pushing!
We definitely need education when it comes to pregnancy, but that education — and dare I say those financial resources funding all these eating-bad-foods-is-bad studies — really needs to be more at the ground level, where it can make a difference to the women who really need it. I'm thinking a few less obvious studies and a few more dollars so doctors don't have to pack 20 patients into an hour and could actually have time to educate their patients might make more of a difference.
And while we're on the subject, have you noticed how many of these so-called studies are solely focused on what women eat? How much we eat, what we eat, if we eat too much or not enough? And then our lifestyle habits — smoking, drinking, exercising, thinking positive thoughts, thinking negative thoughts, skipping yoga class, ignoring your spouse, stressed about being stressed? Call me crazy, but that's a whole lot of pressure on the long-held Madonna idealization of women. Bottom line? If we're not perfect from before that baby is a twinkle in an eye or a laboratory, then we're already lacking as mothers. Sorry, future babies, but mom's already failing you.
And I'm going to show my feminist side here, but how about we throw in a few more studies that obsessively look at how the diet and lifestyle habits of men affect their future offspring? It's not like men contribute half the genetic material that make up a human being or anything...
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