Is Some Alcohol OK During Pregnancy? | Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | [silence]
00:00:03.280 | There's an additional category
00:00:04.660 | that I want to highlight, of course,
00:00:07.100 | and this is vitally important to state,
00:00:10.140 | even though it's obvious,
00:00:11.520 | which is that people who are pregnant
00:00:14.340 | should absolutely not consume alcohol.
00:00:18.020 | Fetal alcohol syndrome is well-known and established.
00:00:22.180 | It's terrible.
00:00:23.260 | Fetuses experience diminished brain development
00:00:27.080 | that's often permanent, diminished limb development,
00:00:30.040 | diminished organ development in the periphery,
00:00:31.960 | meaning the heart, the lungs, the liver, et cetera.
00:00:34.580 | Ingesting alcohol while pregnant is simply a bad idea.
00:00:37.800 | And the reason I say this at all is,
00:00:40.800 | first of all, it's important to include
00:00:42.240 | in an episode like this,
00:00:43.160 | but also because we can look at two things.
00:00:46.840 | First of all, we can look at mechanism,
00:00:48.340 | and then we can also look at some of the lore
00:00:50.920 | that still sadly exists out there.
00:00:53.840 | Let's take care of the lore that sadly exists first.
00:00:57.320 | If you look online,
00:00:59.680 | you will sometimes be able to find, sadly,
00:01:03.380 | that some people believe that certain kinds of alcohol
00:01:07.440 | are not detrimental to fetuses.
00:01:09.280 | They'll say, well, champagne is safe
00:01:11.440 | for a pregnant mother to drink, but beer is not.
00:01:14.260 | That is absolutely categorically false.
00:01:17.320 | Alcohol is alcohol.
00:01:19.240 | There is no evidence whatsoever
00:01:20.920 | that consuming certain types of alcohol
00:01:22.640 | is safer for fetuses than others.
00:01:24.500 | Alcohol is a toxin,
00:01:25.560 | and the reason fetal alcohol syndrome exists
00:01:28.080 | is because the ability of that toxin
00:01:30.920 | to disrupt cellular processes.
00:01:33.100 | Remember tumor growth and the way that alcohol
00:01:36.240 | can accelerate tumor growth by proliferation of cells,
00:01:39.680 | the wrong cells, the ones you don't want to proliferate?
00:01:42.480 | Well, all of embryonic development,
00:01:44.320 | all of fetal development, it's not the growth of a tumor.
00:01:47.280 | It's obviously the growth of an embryo,
00:01:48.880 | and it's done in a very orchestrated way.
00:01:52.360 | I started off studying brain development.
00:01:54.040 | That's where I got my beginnings in neurobiology,
00:01:56.660 | and I still teach embryology to medical students
00:01:59.620 | and graduate students.
00:02:01.400 | The set of coordinated processes that has to take place
00:02:05.380 | from conception to birth in order to give rise
00:02:08.040 | to a healthy embryo is so, so dynamically controlled
00:02:12.180 | and so exquisitely precise with checkpoints
00:02:15.640 | and recovery mechanisms and redundancy
00:02:18.240 | in the genes that are expressed to make sure
00:02:19.840 | that if anything goes wrong, it's repaired, et cetera.
00:02:22.640 | Alcohol as a mutagen, I haven't used that word yet,
00:02:26.560 | but a substance that can mutate DNA
00:02:30.000 | through alterations in DNA methylation
00:02:32.040 | and these checkpoints in the cell cycle.
00:02:34.220 | Alcohol as a mutagen is one of the worst things
00:02:38.240 | that a developing embryo can be exposed to.
00:02:40.720 | And again, because it's water-soluble and fat-soluble,
00:02:43.800 | ingestion of alcohol when people are pregnant
00:02:45.640 | passes right to the fetus.
00:02:47.980 | Now, I realize that a number of people out there
00:02:50.480 | might be thinking, "Oh, goodness, you know,
00:02:51.800 | "I didn't realize I was pregnant
00:02:54.020 | "until a certain stage of pregnancy,
00:02:55.780 | "and before I realized I was ingesting alcohol."
00:02:59.000 | Obviously, one can't undo what's been done,
00:03:02.840 | but I want to also emphasize that fetal alcohol syndrome,
00:03:06.120 | while yes, there's a full-blown syndrome
00:03:08.480 | that manifests as changes in the craniofacial development
00:03:11.000 | that are very obvious, and you can look these up.
00:03:12.880 | You've probably seen these before,
00:03:14.000 | or the pictures before, rather.
00:03:15.640 | It has to do with eye spacing, forehead size,
00:03:17.600 | a number of other features of the craniofacial development,
00:03:20.640 | and of course, stuff's going on in the brain too.
00:03:22.520 | It's along a continuum.
00:03:24.320 | So it is possible that some of the changes that occur
00:03:27.780 | are more minor, and thankfully, the young brain,
00:03:31.620 | in particular the early postnatal brain,
00:03:33.440 | is incredibly plastic.
00:03:34.540 | There are things that can be done
00:03:35.720 | in order to help recover neural circuits
00:03:37.720 | that didn't develop well, et cetera.
00:03:40.720 | But even though it's somewhat obvious, or should be obvious,
00:03:45.120 | I really want to make clear that there's zero evidence
00:03:47.520 | whatsoever that certain forms of alcohol
00:03:49.240 | are safer for pregnant women to ingest than others.
00:03:51.400 | Absolutely wrong.
00:03:52.540 | No one who's pregnant
00:03:53.840 | should be ingesting alcohol whatsoever.
00:03:56.900 | And certainly, if people feel like
00:03:59.160 | they can't avoid alcohol while pregnant,
00:04:01.220 | they really need to work with somebody
00:04:03.000 | to make sure that it just absolutely doesn't happen
00:04:04.840 | because it is so detrimental to the developing fetus.
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