Fertility, Sperm Health, and Nutrition Before and During Pregnancy | Dr Federica Amati

Simon Hill (0:00)

Welcome back to The Proof. I'm your host, Simon Hill, and today's episode is part one of a two-part series with Dr. Federica Amati on the first thousand days of life, from conception through to a child's second birthday. This is the most consequential nutritional window of human life. In part one, we cover the golden window itself, the 90 days before conception, and everything you need to know about nutrition through pregnancy. Let's get into it.

What's the golden window of opportunity?

Federica Amati (0:37)

The golden window of opportunity is a period in time that we refer to in medical science, where so much health is set, so many things happen, that there's just the most opportunity to have a long-term impact on a person's health. In terms of what that timeframe is, it's really the period between conception and second birthday. This is also known as the first thousand days.

Sometimes people like to say, actually, it's technically 30 days preconception and possibly up to the age of three, so the golden window is a little bit stretchy, but it's all tied to, anchored to this principle called DOHAD, which is the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Principle, which essentially speaks to the fact that all of our organs are formed. Most of our cells are sort of set in terms of their health in the first thousand days of our lives. And it's called the golden window because the positive of this is that if we intervene in this time frame, we can have really measurable long-term positive effects on the health and the life of that baby.

Simon Hill (1:50)

And when you say intervene, that's thinking about what parents are doing, preconception during pregnancy, and then how a baby is being fed.

Federica Amati (2:00)

Yes, it's what parents are doing. But Simon, I think it's important to frame very early on in this conversation that it's also the kind of environment that we live in, which is shaped by the policies and the political will to make sure that the best possible environment is created. So as you'll be aware, lots of policies and lots of the ways that we structure things like hazard for pollutants, for example, is centered around adult health. So we think of things as being safe limits or even a healthy pollution levels for adults.

And actually, if there was a better understanding of the importance of the Golden Window of Opportunity, and it was part of the way we think about structuring our environment at policy level, we would really shift the way we think about these things. So yes, it's parental knowledge, empowering parents to know that they have so much potential they can do here. But it's also taking the blame away from parents and letting them know that actually at the moment, in many countries, it's quite hard to set up the best possible environment for this time frame.

Simon Hill (3:12)

And why is this important? Why are you so passionate about this, setting up the best possible environment, helping to educate and inform parents and policy makers? What are the consequences, I guess, of not getting this right? And what's up for grabs if we do better in this area?

Federica Amati (3:28)

I'm really passionate about it because there's just so much potential for it and also because when I started doing research into this, started looking into this about a decade ago now, no, actually maybe longer than that, I was very surprised to see just how much of our health is decided so early on in our lives before we're even born most of the time. And this transgenerational effect, you know, the fact that we now know that some of my health was set when I was a cell inside my mother, as she was developing inside her mother's womb. Like that blows your mind when you think about that, right? So Simon, the egg that became you was already forming inside your mother's tiny, tiny ovaries when she was inside your grandmother's womb. So once you start to look at this, there's a transgenerational effect. It's really the longevity lever we have never talked about.

Everything that happens in the first 1000 days is what sets the slope for your aging later in life. So we should really be thinking about this in a much longer term way. So I was excited by the prospect of what the evidence is showing us. A lot of the evidence we have around this hypothesis, the Doha hypothesis and transgenerational effects comes from quite tragic things like famines and what happens when things go wrong. But what has allowed us to understand is that there's something we can do to intervene to make the outcomes for the mother and for the baby both in the short term and the very long term and that baby's offspring. So to me it's the most bang for your buck you can possibly get when we think about public health interventions. And I'm passionate about it because it's just not spoken about. It's not something that's often communicated clearly.