When Jonell Francis, one of my long-time Veggie Gals girlfriends, spoke at my holistic LDS mothering conference three years ago, she said something that totally impressed me. Jonell is an amazing mom of 9 who wrote a cookbook called The Feel Good Foods Cookbook. http://www.myyeasttreatment.com/good-foods-recipes/ She said that “health begins in the navel.” (Doctrine and Covenants 89:18 promises “health in the navel.’) She told her story of being diagnosed with fibromyalgia and how conventional medicine could not help her. She suffered for over ten years of this. She finally listened to a friend who gently suggested that a chronic yeast condition might be the root of her illness. You can listen to her talk by clicking on the “downloads” tab above and scrolling down to find her hame.

She went on a long healing journey that included a yeast free diet (gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free) and healed herself, or allowed God to heal her by following eternal laws of health. The main idea is that our guts (symbolized by the navel) have to have a certain ecology, or balance of good bacteria to keep the yeast in our body in check. If our gut ecology gets out of balance, with yeast overgrowth, many illnesses can result. Health really does begin in the navel, with the food that we eat that decreases the promotion of yeast. What we eat affects how we feel, and as Jonell said at my conference, “Ladies, we can build Zion from our kitchen counters.”

So that made me pause to wonder. Is there some connection between the navel, and the place underneath the navel, a person’s gut, and the health of the mother when a person was connected by the navel to the mother through the tree of life of the placenta? (In chapter 2 of my book you can see an illustration of how the placenta looks like a tree, to see it, click on the tab above that says, “the book” and go to chapter 2)

The answer to the above question is YES! At least according to Jennifer Tow, a holistic IBCLC. See her web site here http://holisticibclc.blogspot.com/ Who would have thought that the following issues that often face new mothers can all come from the health of  a mother’s gut: (copied from her web site):

post-partum depression, food allergies, milk supply, PCOS, tongue-tie, reflux, ‘high-need’ infant behavior, slow growth, failure to thrive and numerous feeding difficulties may all find origins in the integrity and vitality of the mother’s internal terrain. In attending to the health of the maternal gut, while supporting the infant in his own healing, we may find that many breastfeeding problems are resolved both acutely and chronically.

 

You can listen to fascinating interview all about this with Ms. Tow here http://www.blogtalkradio.com/progressive-parenting/2012/05/28/nutrition-gut-health-breastfeeding-wjennifer-tow-ibclc

So not only does health begin in the navel, health begins in the navel of our mother. A mother is the tree of digestive health to her baby! And that’s just relating to her gut ecology. The milk she chooses to give her baby also affects her baby’s gut ecology. Mother’s milk keeps that baby’s gut in balanced ecology. Anything else given to a baby, until the baby’s digestive system has matured to handle solid food, can upset the ecology. 

Here’s a quote from the web site http://coolinginflammation.blogspot.com by Dr Art Ayers, who wrote “Mother’s milk is fierce!”:

Milk as it is transferred from breast to baby is loaded with molecular weapons for the protection of the baby’s respiratory and digestive systems. Cells from the mother are transferred along with the milk and quickly spread out on the surface of the mouth and digestive system to patrol for pathogens. The mother’s immune system detects potential risks as the baby’s mouth contacts the mother’s lymphatic system at the breast, and the antibodies that are subsequently produced are transferred into the milk. Enzymes in the milk digest bacterial cell walls and other milk proteins are converted into anti-bacterial peptides in the baby’s stomach before ultimately being digested into amino acid nutrients. Many of the fat/lipid nutrients in milk are also anti-bacterial or anti-viral. Most of the carbohydrate in milk is the simple disaccharide lactose that most bacteria can’t use for food. The remaining 10% of the carbohydrates are extensions of the lactose to make galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS, a.k.a. bifidus factor) that are toxic to all but the few bacterial species that make up the highly specialized microbial community of the human baby gut flora. (Cow’s milk has an entirely different composition, e.g. lacks bifidus factor, and supports a different gut flora.)

That’s the power of mother’s milk!