I think the Wall-E film's prediction of the future is closer to the reality, unfortunately.

Assuming that you get the woman very healthy prior to the pregnancy, you will have a favorable environment for the embryo to develop and you will get an optimally healthy baby if all goes as planned. I would follow some of the advice of the Weston A. Price chick Kaayla T. Daniel for that. Breastfeed them FFS and then get them to eat a very healthy diet all of their lives and you will have an insanely healthy person who will live a very very long time.

Having said that, we consistently see people start eating an excellent diet and their blood tests and health gets to become optimal. Just between all of the angles a paleo diet and lifestyle hits, you can take nearly anyone unless they have done permanent damage and reverse that to get stunning fasting glucose, blood lipids, c-reactive protein and all of the things that predict long-term health. It will be longer and harder for some people but once we give our bodies what they need to thrive, they do. Most people (anyone who doesn't have birth defects or unfortunate genetic abnormalities) have all of the necessary biological apparatus to become very healthy. Robb Wolf for instance. Grows up sick with celiac and now is as healthy as can be. He did it pretty quickly too.

Well with a bit of luck and excellent guidance from myself and my other half, we will bring up our Paleo child to become a super human, gut healthy lady, although chances are in her teenage rebellion stage she will probably get into doughnuts and double cheeseburgers.... unfortunately she hasn't been Paleo all her early life, untill we discovered it, she eats the same way as us, but I did breastfeed her for two years so hoepfully gave her a really good start in life. As healthy and thriving as I obviously hope her to be, I just hope there is a "healthy" world for her to grow up in In EVERY sense.

It's a fair question; I often wonder how different things would be if I had eaten an evolutionarily-appropriate diet from birth. Would I have the same stature? Would I naturally have a lot more muscle? Would my brain be as large as that of a cro-magnon? Hell, even if I had just eaten liver my whole life, it would have likely made a huge difference.

I think that if we had enough people eating Paleo their whole lives (or, if they got dairy, had it the traditional way rather than industrial), we'd start seeing more and more NORMAL people--normal for the way the DNA codes, anyway, rather than majority-normal. Right now there are a lot of deformed and metabolically-deranged people in the modern world, and some of them you wouldn't even guess have those problems because the skeletal structure they have has become so common, even though it's not optimal.

I don't care if we're super. Irrelevant. I'm not out to see superheroes taking over the world. I would just like to see my species achieve its genetic potential. And I think some of us have not done that in a very long time. Just since the agricultural revolution we have lost height and brain capacity, to say nothing of everything else that's gone wrong.

Very interesting question! All I can say is I hope that my little guy will be the picture of what you describe - intelligent, with 'amazing human attributes and abilities, both physically and mental'.

I guess only time will tell.

Like Carly, my little guy has not been paleo since conception, but he has been primarily paleo since we had the information available.

Interesting to see what people's thoughts are here re: nature vs. nurture, and how paleo fits into that debate.

I think that I am trying to provide him the best 'nature' (and by that giving him the best diet so he can reach his physical potential) that I can - now on the the 'nurture' :D

Magical thinking is neither nutrition nor progress.