So my wife and I are at a friends wedding.
We just finished dinner and a tub of
vanilla ice cream is opened up in the room
next door, it’s about 500 feet away.
I have no idea this is happening.
My wife on the other hand is completely
overwhelmed by the smell of vanilla.
In her words it’s assaulting her senses
and I also notice, she hasn't touched her champagne.
When she bolts to ladies room after feeling
nauseous on the dance floor,
it hits me we're going to have a baby.
We had a beautiful baby girl
a few months later.
but ever since the wedding I wanted to
find out more about why pregnant women
get this super human sense of smell.
And what causes those 2 a.m. pickle cravings?
How does mom's diet influence
the baby's favorite foods?
On this Mother's Day addition of Reactions,
we’ll explain these and other amazing
science facts about pregnancy.
Well like many things in pregnancy,
the changes that a woman's, um, that
occurred to a woman senses really
are largely related to hormones.
During pregnancy are levels of estrogen
increase quite a bit and as levels of
estrogen change we may note different
aspects of our senses and certainly
smell and taste are, are big ones.
Probably two-thirds of pregnant women will
report that they're very sensitive to odors.
But when it comes to the science that
tries to investigate this, there's
not a lot about evidence for it.
What may be changing as that what's the lowest
concentration of an odor can detect from
maybe the change in how much you like the odor.
That, what was once pleasant now is unpleasant.
There are a lot of hypotheses.
Unfortunately, that's mostly what they are,
about how these cravings occur.
Leptin is secreted by our fat cells.
Leptin is known to decrease our appetite
and increase your metabolism.
We know that that leptin changes during pregnancy.
Neuropeptide Y is another substance
that's out there that's considered an
appetite stimulant and has been shown
to rise as pregnancy continues.
There is evidence that there may be
heightened bitter sense taste sensitivity,
especially during the first trimester.
There's a whole host of hypothesis is
why that maybe the case, and actually
that this heightened sensitivity
may be protecting the fetus.
Because it's - one of the results,
is mothers are eating bitter tasting foods
that could contain toxins.
Just like they're learning about your voice,
about the language you speak, they're also
learning about the foods that you eat.
It's a really beautiful and elegant system
that is common to all mammals, is that
the first way in which we learn about
foods are through these flavors
they get transmitted from the diet
via the bloodstream into the amniotic
fluid and then mothers milk.
The baby has a well-developed sensory
system that can detect these flavors.
The baby we'll be learning and there
is research showing that if you eat
these foods, your baby is at an
advantage when you first offer
those foods and will like them.
The whole like neural and hormonal
interactions for mother baby or
parent baby are really quite powerful.
We know that oxytocin is a chemical messenger,
it's released in the brain and it's released
in response to a social contact,
particularly skin-to-skin contact.
What it then does insights desire for further contact.
So it’s part of the reason that
we place a baby immediately on
mommy's belly or up near her chest,
we want that skin-to-skin contact to begin.
High estrogen in pregnancy causes
an increased throughout
the pregnancy of the number of
oxytocin receptors in mommy's brain.
And then as oxytocin starts to surge
in labor, so baby and mom here then
exposed to that oxytocin and it's
literally would be like trying to set
them up to start craving each other.
In some ways if you think too much
about how all of these things work,
very important for your doctor
to be thinking about it,
but as the person who is going through it,
sometimes it's to try to recognize these
are changes that happen, they’re natural,
they’re important.
They probably have a role,
they're doing something good,
but not to the point where we
would become so obsessed that
we miss the miracle here,
because really indeed,
it certainly is.