We may go beyond the immediate results of a deficient diet during pregnancy or during lactation. It is really necessary to begin right eating before birth, even before conception. Repeated experiments with animals and numerous observations on humans have demonstrated that certain long-continued dietary deficiencies result in serious impairment of the generative organs. Animals so fed conceive less often and have smaller litters than well-nourished animals. Exclusive diets of fats and proteins and carbohydrates and lime-poor diets have such effects. Defective nutrition may lead to degeneration of the mammary glands with resulting changes in the composition of the milk or a failure of the milk supply.

Short experiments are of little value in determining the value of a dietary. In animal experimentation it has been found that on a given diet the animals may seem perfectly healthy and apparently well-developed and reproduce their kind, and in the third or fourth generation symptoms, the outcome of deficiencies of organic salts, make their appearance. Control animals under the same conditions, except that they are adequately provided with the element or elements deficient in the experimental diet, remain free from the degenerative symptoms.

Osborn and Mendel, as well as McCollum, have repeatedly stated that the thriving of a single generation on a diet is no guarantee that it is a satisfactory one. It may be only slightly inadequate and its effects may become apparent only after the passing of several generations. After the passing of a few generations on a slightly inadequate diet, the animals suddenly cease to conceive so often, and give birth to weakly and short-lived offspring. Finally complete sterility or failure of lacteal secretion occur.

It is often only after the lapse of several generations that all of the evil effects of an unbalanced diet become apparent. It is only then that lessened fertility shows up and the offspring are weak and short-lived. Ultimate sterility and inability to secrete milk ends the line.

Undoubtedly the increasing inability of civilized mothers to nurse their babies is the result of the denatured diet they have been existing on for the past two or three generations. Defective nutrition may even lead to degeneration of the mammary glands with resulting changes in the composition of the milk.

Berg says: "From a communication made to me verbally by Urbeanu I learn that he saw barn door fowls, provided with what seemed a bare sufficiency of calcium, develop for three generations in a way that appeared perfectly normal, but the birds of the third generation were sterile because their eggs had no yolks. Control birds were still entirely normal in the fifth generation" Who can estimate the amount of "degeneration," deformity "hereditary disease," inability to nurse, to conceive or procreate, inability to give birth, nervous and mental disorder, etc., that is due to the faulty diet of those who have gone before? The fathers have eaten inadequate diets and the children's teeth have holes in them.

The effect of deficient diets reach through more than one generation. Female dogs fed on a diet which produces rickets gave birth to pups which were so strongly predisposed to rickets that the feeding of good food for a considerable period did not remove the tendency to rickets. The dietary deficiencies also increased the susceptibility of the young to respiratory troubles, such as catarrhal conditions (these often extending into and impairing the digestive tract) and pneumonia.

Physicians of experience have all seen instances of thin, poorly developed women, who have been sick all or most of their lives and who have conceived, perhaps, only after six, eight, ten or more years of married life, give birth to babies apparently normal, but weak and not able to eat. They have juggled the diets of such infants in every conceivable manner without success, because these children should never have been born and in many instances will not be able to live. I have seen two such children from one such mother and one such child from another such mother. Strangely enough the desire for motherhood is often stronger in these women, who should not have children, than in normal women.

Children born of well-nourished parents have good digestive powers; whereas children of poorly nourished parents are likely to have poor digestive powers. This fact is also attested by stock raisers with reference to their stock.

Well-nourished mothers (this does not mean over-fed) give birth to well-nourished and, therefore, well-developed and vital children. Not merely are the bones and teeth and respiratory organs involved in the results of adequate or inadequate diets, but every tissue in the body is weakened or strengthened, as the case may be, by the mother's food. Mother's nutrition is the real prenatal influence.

McCollum has pointed out that a slightly deficient diet eaten over a period of generations, lowers vitality, predisposes to premature old age, and shortens life. Grant and Goetsch found a slightly deficient diet, when eaten over a long period of time produces pathological conditions which never result from extreme dietary deficiencies. They found that young animals have rickets only when the diet of the mother is of a type which leads to rickets. They proved that the mother's diet governs absolutely the decreased resistance of the young to the effects of deficiencies in their own food. Rickets they found, will not develop in young animals whose diet is deficient in bone material, providing they are born of well-nourished mothers. The rapidity and severity with which rickets develops in young animals, depends very largely upon the depletion of the mother's nutrition during pregnancy.

"Poorly nourished cows frequently give birth to weak, puny calves which are hard to raise," says the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture. "The feeding of the calf, therefore, begins before it is born."

The facts here stated as true of cows and calves are equally as true of human mothers and their infants. The food elements essential for the development of the infant are taken into the mother's stomach, digested and absorbed into her blood, from which they are transmitted to the fetus, through the umbilical cord. If the mother does not consume food of a character to maintain her in a vigorous condition, and at the same time supply the needs of the infant, both she and the infant will suffer. In endeavoring to rear healthy, vigorous children many mothers handicap themselves at the start by not eating properly.

The facts given in this chapter by no means cover all the troubles that may be produced in the offspring by faulty feeding of pregnant women. They are enough, however, to reveal the urgent necessity for mothers and mothers-to-be to intelligently consider and adequately study the vitally important subject of prenantal feeding.

Let the mother not forget that not alone the teeth, but the bones and all the other tissues of her child, its future growth and de-development, its susceptibility or "resistance to disease," its chances of survival and much else depend upon the food with which she supplies it during the nine months of ante-natal life. Her own health and the integrity of her own tissues, perhaps, even the integrity of her mind is wrapped up very largely in her diet during this period. The mother's responsibilities are great and she cannot shirk them without paying a heavy penalty; and without, also causing her child to have to pay. It is not just a matter of her teeth or of her child's teeth.