If you’ve spent any time in Texas hospitals, you might have noticed that Mexican babies seem to be born with a full, luxuriant, head of hair. Not always, of course, but much more often that Anglo infants. I always assumed it was a genetic thing, tracing back to Mayan ancestry or some such, but that was simply an assumption.
Now I learn that it may have been caused by gas!
I came upon this explanation on line -
Folk Wisdom Or Science? If you suffer from heartburn during pregnancy, your baby is likely to be born with a full head of hair.
Answer: Science
“Folksy” sounding but true. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore found that when pregnant women reported moderate heartburn, they had hairy newborns 82 percent of the time; the majority of heartburn-free women gave birth to bald babies.
Surprised? So was the study’s lead author, Kathleen a. Costigan, R.N., M.P.H., director of the hospital’s Fetal Assessment Center. “I had heard this old wives’ tale hundreds of times and used to tell my patients it was nonsense,” she says. “We undertook this study thinking that we would debunk the myth!” Researchers surmise that higher levels of estrogen and progesterone, the pregnancy hormones that stimulate fetal hair growth, also relax the esophageal sphincter, allowing stomach acid to back up into the esophagus and cause gastric reflux, aka heartburn.
This was just one of the surprises in an article on the Fit Pregnancy Website
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