Having a baby is energetically much more expensive than commonly thought, according to new research. In fact, over the course of a pregnancy, creating and carrying a little one takes 49,753 dietary calories — the equivalent of 164 Snickers candy bars, said Dr. Dustin Marshall, a coauthor of the study published May 16 in the journal Science.
For the meta-analysis, Marshall, a professor of evolutionary biology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a team of researchers used data from thousands of existing scientific articles to look at the energy cost of several species. Top health headlines, all in one place "While most folks probably intuit, or have actually experienced the high energy demands that come from gestating a baby, our work assigns explicit values to these costs across a wide range of species — from insects to lizards to humans," said lead study author Dr. Samuel Ginther, a postdoctoral researcher of biological sciences at Monash University, in an email.
"We found that the total energy it takes to reproduce is much more substantial than previously considered." The bulk of the additional energy a pregnant person needs goes toward developing and carrying the fetus, Ginther added. "Most of (the) energy that mammals put into reproduction is 'boiled off' as metabolic heat, only 10 per cent ends up in the actual baby," Marshall said in an email.
"When both lactation and metabolic loads are accounted for, the baby itself represents less than 1/20th of the .
