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Comment by pkoird | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but what? Do you have any references for this?

Sure. Omega-3, a critical ingredient for having smart kids, is depleted during pregnancy, and few women supplement enough to fully replenish.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3046737/

Aren't prenatal vitamins (which include omega-3) essentially prescribed by default nowadays?

Yes, which is why OP's study based on data from the 1950s is already problematic.

However, a fixed cocktail of supplements isn't ideal. Some people actually get their bloodwork done and concentrate on what they really need.

This study doesn’t at all say what you originally claimed about moms “running out of resources as time goes on” when it comes to birth order and IQs. Either you missed the point or you honest to god don’t care about spreading disgusting misinformation.

Actually, it does, but only if you have reasonable reading comprehension.

How is what I'm saying "disgusting misinformation"? I'm very interested in what precisely you're angry at.

This article is about diet. Where is the source that says that women have stored reserves of omega 3 that are depleted with measurable impacts on later born children?

I'm sorry, do I need to post a biology class in here too? I can post the study about how women with bigger butts have smarter children due to higher Omega-3 availability, and the study detailing the depletion during pregnancy, and the study I already posted on Omega 3 in the diet.

Or, the idea that building a human depletes resources could be relatively uncontroversial, because duh.

Please post those studies I want to seem something.

Omega-3 stays in your body for only about 6 months and must be continuously replenished. This can be an issue over the course of a single pregnancy. But it's not something that gets progressively depleted over multiple pregnancies.

This is obviously real, and timelines/effects differ. How could growth in utero not matter? And how could pregnancy not deplete resources? That depletion can be reduced and managed, but it happens. I would suspect that most women are anemic by third trimester, just to pick an easy one. Even keeping on weight while breastfeeding can be challenging, to look at an even coarser metric. All of this is pretty consistent with the general unlikelihood of getting pregnant within one year or , sometimes, up to 18 months postpartum, amd you'll often see 3 year spacing as an ideal target. Obviously, that spacing requires that you start having kids pretty early or continue pretty late if you want a large family.

Seeking published results about this is hard because, first, social science and therefore observational studies with results that can readily be disputed; and second, this is one of those "shaming mothers" things that gets tabled or not suggested as research in the first place.

The actual data indicates that while gestational anemia is a significant problem, it doesn't impact most US women. The majority of US residents get adequate dietary iron, and prenatal vitamin supplements also contain iron. The problem is more severe in developing countries.

https://doi.org/10.3945%2Fajcn.117.155986

Considering that OP's study is from the US in the 40s through 60s, gestational anemia probably factors in.

Also, anemia is a single deficiency. How many more opportunities for deficiency are there? Hundreds?

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