The next few weeks will see plenty of news stories about the potentially devastating effects of President Trump’s proposed budget, especially the proposed 29 percent cut to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or what used to be known as food stamps.
A program that’s been around since the 1960s, SNAP has been studied extensively and consistently been shown to be effective in lifting people out of poverty and reducing the number of people who are food insecure.
You may already know that the food a woman eats while pregnant and breastfeeding has a direct effect on her developing baby, but you may not know that what a woman eats prior to conceiving is just as important.
Good nutrition before becoming pregnant creates a healthy body that will be ready to nourish a developing baby. While a woman provides the environment that supports and nurtures her developing child,
The message that we should be eating better is nothing new. We hear it everywhere. But making sense of the advice on what to eat or not eat seems to be constantly changing – one minute eggs are good for us, the next minute eggs are bad. We’re told our health problems result from all that saturated fat we consumed, no wait it’s carbs that are making us fat, or maybe it’s all the added sugar,
Who was David Barker?
David Barker was a pioneer, among the first to tie chronic disease in adulthood to growth patterns in early life. His work began nearly 30 years ago while studying birth and death records in England, where he noticed a link between low birth weight and a risk for dying from coronary heart disease as an adult. He developed a hypothesis that early-life nutrition and growth is an important factor in determining whether a baby will grow up to be more or less vulnerable to cardiac and metabolic disorders.
Have you ever stopped to really think about what you eat? And why you eat it? Have you ever considered where your food comes from, how it was produced? Or really thought about how what you eat affects your health, or the health of your future children and grandchildren? The answer is probably no. It’s not something we’ve been encouraged to do. Our lack of attention to our food has an enormous influence on the health of the American public.