Most doctors recommend that pregnant women eat a nutritious diet to promote the health of their babies. However, mos...

Emil-Kunkin on June 26, 2022

Hi Tyler808,

The paradox we are trying to resolve is that doctors recommend that pregnant women eat a nutritious diet, those babies whose mothers did eat well tend to develop at least one medical problem in their first year.

My first reaction is that this paradox is actually pretty common-sense. Sure, babies whose moms ate well have medical issues, but all babies have medical issues. I have no idea how frequently babies develop a medical problem, but the sheer number of possible medical problems (fever, sore throat, ear infection, the flu) makes me think that it would be quite rare for a baby to not have at least one problem within a year.

More importantly, we have no idea if there is a difference between the number of medical problems (or severity, or likelihood) experienced by babies whose moms ate healthy as opposed to the ones whose moms did not. Perhaps it is the case that babies whose moms did not follow the diet all had 5+ medical problems in their first year. This would certainly show why doctors continue to recommend healthy diet- while they do not prevent all problems, they lead to fewer problems than the alternative.

This is exactly what we have in C. The paradox was not why the babies have medical issues, but why doctors continue to recommend a healthy diet if those babies still have medical issues. C shows that a healthy diet reduces, but does not eliminate, medical issues.