At Goodwood Heath Summit 2024, a professor said ‘the current generation will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents'.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I'm a clinical nutritionist and I head up the Goodwood Health Programmes
00:04and I work with Her Grace to put the summits together.
00:07So this is our second Goodwood Health Summit
00:09and it's about spreading the word about important matters to do with health.
00:13So last year it was about the cost of poor nutrition
00:15and this year it's about the importance of the first five years of infant health
00:19and nutrition and the power of breastfeeding.
00:21So we have phenomenal, literally world-class leading experts
00:27in why the breast milk is so important for the health of the baby
00:31and the knock-on effects of all of that.
00:33Wonderful conversations will be had today
00:35and then we're doing a panel in the afternoon so we can do Q&A
00:38and we've got people looking in on the internet watching us
00:42as well as in the in the room so it's going to be a lot of debate,
00:45questions, a lot of fun.
00:46I'm a documentary filmmaker and I made the film Microbirth
00:50which was shown all around the world and I'm here to meet other people
00:56and to connect and just to galvanise support really
00:59for the we've got a global campaign to to bring attention
01:02to what this summit's all about.
01:05When I was pregnant I thought I was super, super prepared.
01:08I took two antenatal classes, I took a separate breastfeeding class.
01:11I'm a documentary filmmaker so I'm all about that preparation,
01:14preparation is key and on my birth plan it was really simple.
01:19I wanted to have a home birth if possible
01:21and I wanted to exclusively breastfeed
01:23but actually what happened is I had an emergency c-section
01:26and I had no support for skin-to-skin and no support for breastfeeding
01:31so from that point on I struggled to breastfeed
01:34and my child does have an autoimmune disease
01:39that may or may not be connected to what happened during the birth period
01:44but it put fire in my belly once I discovered this science
01:49about the infant microbiome and what parents can do,
01:53really simple things they can do during pregnancy, birth
01:56and in the first few weeks and first few months.
01:58It's empowering to have this knowledge that you can apply
02:02at any stage of your life whether you're pregnant or not pregnant,
02:05whether you had a baby 20 years ago, there's still things you can do
02:09and it's exciting.
02:10Pro Vice-Chancellor of Health and Life Sciences, that's one of my jobs.
02:14Another job is I'm an obstetrician, I deliver babies for a living
02:17and my research interest rests in pregnancy
02:22and those first 1,000 days for the product of that pregnancy for babies
02:28and I've spent about 20-25 years really researching complications of pregnancy
02:33and how to improve the health and well-being of babies
02:37in that very first critical 1,000 days.
02:39It's really interesting right, there is a body of evidence now
02:42that suggests that the current generation will be the first
02:45for over 100 years to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
02:50It's fair to say that women's health and pregnancy in particular
02:53is still hugely underfunded, there's a huge amount we don't know
02:57about how the infant microbiome is seeded,
03:01why infant nutrition is so important, the components of infant nutrition,
03:08what works, what doesn't, the underpinning mechanisms.
03:11We probably don't know what we don't know
03:13and as a scientist that's really frustrating
03:15so it's brilliant to be at this summit
03:18surrounded by like-minded experts who are all passionate about this topic
03:23and who are all striving to make the world a better place.