burtlancast
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This comes from the transcribed interview Life Supporting Substances - It's Rain Making Time, 2011-07-04
Ray explains that animal studies back in the 1960’s and 70’s showed that sugar and progesterone are factors that increase brain growth development and learning ability.
The way to have precocious, prodigy babies seems thus to provide them with high glucose and high progesterone during pregnancy, and to limit polyunsaturated fats, which have exactly the opposite effects.
Ray explains that animal studies back in the 1960’s and 70’s showed that sugar and progesterone are factors that increase brain growth development and learning ability.
The way to have precocious, prodigy babies seems thus to provide them with high glucose and high progesterone during pregnancy, and to limit polyunsaturated fats, which have exactly the opposite effects.
KG: Why did they call it brain food? I don't mean lodged in the brain, but why did they call it like it's really good for your brain? Why?
RP: Well, just about three years ago, a group in France who believed it decided to put electrodes on pregnant women to measure the fetus’s response to various sounds they could detect. And so they found that they could train the baby to respond to different sounds before it was born. And so they said: “We will demonstrate that DHA and EPA are brain food, improving the quality of the brain” by doing measurements of the ability to learn of the fetus. And they found exactly what they hadn't expected, that the brain learning response was retarded in proportion to the mother's consumption of the fish fat type of highly unsaturated fats. And after the babies were born, in fact they were underdeveloped - including the brain - which was exactly what animal experimenters had demonstrated way back in the 1970’s (when pregnant mice were put on a diet of either highly unsaturated vegetable oil or saturated fat, those babies that were exposed to the high prenatal diet of unsaturated fats had smaller brains and they didn't learn as well as those babies that had been exposed to saturated fats (they could grind up and weight the brains of mice, and so on). So, both in the recent studies in humans and the old studies in animals show that the polyunsaturated fats retard brain development, both in function and in actual size. Studies back in the 1960’s and 70’s also showed that sugar and progesterone are factors that increase brain growth development and learning ability.
KG: Did you say sugar and progesterone?
RP: Yah, for example Zamenhof was the person who discovered that a chicken's embryo brain grew rapidly as long as there was still glucose present inside the egg. And he found that the brain stopped growing as soon as the supply of glucose in the egg ran out; even though there was still a lot of energy food (the polyunsaturated fat or saturated fat), there was still enough for the body to keep growing, but the brain stopped when the glucose ran out. So, at that number of days of development, he would open the eggshell and inject a little bit of glucose or other food that was equivalent to glucose and showed that it didn't affect the body size very much, because all chickens had enough fat in the egg for the body to grow, but the brains kept growing because of the added glucose to the egg. And the chickens were born with uniquely large brains for a chicken and they were smarter than ordinary chickens.
KG: How do we process what you’ve just said, cause it can be confusing for us?
RP: Obstetricians, as recently as old people that I knew, old doctors in the 1970’s were still aware of the fact that their so-called diabetic mothers very often had extremely precocious babies. I talked to one woman who was told to go on a reducing diet because of her previous pregnancies. She had had very high blood sugar, and I asked her how that baby had turned out. She said, "Oh, he taught himself to read when he was two years old. When he was four he was already wearing adult hat sizes”, which is basically an extension of what Zamenhof demonstrated with chicken embryo development. Sugar is the limiting factor, usually, in brain development. In the 1970’s, doctors were looking for new diseases to treat, and diabetes was extended to include the very completely new concept of gestational diabetes. And where a 130 blood sugar had been considered very healthy for a pregnant woman, they now wanted to restrain the level of blood sugar during pregnancy. And they started calling it a disease. “gestational diabetes”, that really was just a healthy pregnancy in most cases.
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