Survival of the Sickest

I picked this book up off the community bookshelf in my house and started reading it back in September or October. I passed it off to a roommate to read and then didn't get around to it again until June. I still didn't really read it until my roadtrip to Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia with my parents, at which point I annoyingly interrupted their relaxation or their own reading to blurt out facts or read aloud passages. Then I insisted that they each read it. To my the book's credit, they both found it fascinating. 

Survival of the Sickest
Dr.  Sharon Moalem with Jonathan Prince

It is a really interesting book because the premise is that there must be some reason why the diseases and problems that we have today exist; otherwise, why didn't our ancestors with those diseases just die out?

The chapters explore various health problems:

1. Hemachromatosis (when the body overloads on iron) and anemia
2. Diabetes
3. Cholesterol
4. Favism (most common enzyme deficiency in the world)
5. Microbes (host relationships)
6. Genes
7. Epigenetics (study of changes in gene expression not caused by DNA)
8. Cancer

Considering how scientific these subjects are and that they are being discussed from a medical and historical background, the book is quite easy and enjoyable to read. I certainly am no scientist, and I found it very approachable and interesting. I also love reading this kind of thing because it's always about something I have never considered or researched before and then I come out of the reading experience feeling like a new part of the world has been ever so slightly revealed to me. It is a great feeling to feel like I have a little bit firmer grasp on reality, and what I often find even more interesting, the human body.

As much as I would love to summarize everything I learned in this book, all I can really say is to go read it yourself. Some of the interesting things that I learned and will be taking into account in my own life (mostly copied from the book, using his own explanation to ensure that I get it right):

• When you are in the sun, your pituitary gland produces hormones that boost your melanocytes, which produce melanin (thus preventing sunburn). When you wear sunglasses, however, your optic nerve doesn't sense the extent of light around your body, so it doesn't send that message to your pituitary gland, and you get sunburn. So, I'm going to stick with my low SPF sunscreen (because I want the UV rays to process my cholesterol into Vitamin D), but I also will not wear sunglasses whenever the sun isn't really in my eyes. 
• I found out a LOT of things that I will keep in mind once I start down the reproduction track in life:
• There is a field called epigenetics, which is the study of how children can inherit and express seemingly new traits from their parents without changes in their underlying DNA.
• Maternal nutrition can permanently alter gene expression in her offspring without altering genes themselves. How? Which?
• If a newly pregnant mother spends the first weeks of her pregnancy eating a typical junk-food-laden diet, the embryo might receive signals that it's going to be born into a harsh environment where critical types of food are scarce. Through a combination of epigenetic effects, various genes are turned on and off and the baby is born small, so it needs less food to survive. So, this baby is born with a metabolism to help it survive the famine that it interprets exists from its lack of good maternal nutrition, and it grows up to be overweight because it hordes energy. 
• Shockingly, a low-protein diet within the first four days (no typo there, folks) led to sheep and rat babies prone to high blood pressure. 
• Even dads can have an effect: fathers who smoked before puberty had sons who were significantly fatter than normal; this may be a result of something similar to the poor nutrition from the mother: the toxins suggest a difficult environment, so the baby is born ready to hoard energy.
• A woman gets her full set of eggs while she is a fetus in her mother's womb. This means that the epigenetic signals sent from your grandmother to your mother are also passed onto the eggs that provide half of your DNA.
• In a study of rats (okay, not humans, but still applicable enough for me to go for it), rats that received different levels of attention in the first few hours after birth grew up to have significantly different stress/confidence levels. Pups that were gently licked by their mothers grew into confidence rat babies that were relatively relaxed and could handle stressful situations. Rats that were ignored by their mothers grew up to be nervous wrecks. To the suspicious: they did a blind study where they switched biological rat pups with their mothers, and regardless of their genes/methyl markers, the rats that were licked and attended to were also relaxed while the others grew up to be stressed. I'm going to insist that I get my baby right away and shower on some affectionate physical loving.
• Based on the skeletal adaptations that allow us humans to walk on two feet, there is reason to believe that we developed in a semi-aquatic environment: water helps support our weight, it would encourage us to lose our hair, it would encourage us to attach fat to our skin like other water mammals, and it would help us give birth after we changed our skeletal structure. Giving birth as a human is not a fun experience, or so I have heard. Nothing fits well, the baby's head is bigger than the pelvic opening, and the birth canal is all twisted. All other animals give birth to their young on their own; we can't. Giving birth in water, however, really helps the birthing process. Studies have shown that it is at least as safe as conventional methods and may even have some remarkable advantages.
• No increase in infection in either mothers or newborns
• May be additional protection for newborns against pneumonia. Babies don't gasp for air until they feel air on their face; when they're underwater, they hold their breath. This allows their faces to be cleaned underwater of all the fecal matter/birthing residue that doctors must conventionally wipe off as they are breathing in their first breaths. 
• First time mothers had a much shorter first stage of labor.
• Women delivering in water had a dramatic reduction in the need for episiotomies (surgical cut routinely performed in hospital births to expand a woman's vaginal opening in order to prevent complications from tearing). Most of the time they weren't necessary because the water allowed for more of a stretch.
• Only 5% of women starting labor in water asked for an epidural, compared to 66% of conventional births. 

Okay, so that was quite long. But really, I found this whole book absolutely fascinating. And I'm definitely going to be aware of this book when I start trying to have kids: eat really well-rounded meals, have a water birth, and be physically affectionate as soon as possible.