Beautiful Babies: Nutrition Matters from FoodRenegade on Vimeo.

Chances are, if you’ve ever been pregnant, you’ve heard the phrase, “You’re eating for two.” Many times it is given as a license for you to indulge in that next serving of pizza, brownie, or bowl of chips. OK, true confessions time, even I have used it myself as a license in my head to eat more of what is not necessarily the most nutrient dense foods. Unfortunately for my tastebuds when I am pregnant and craving potato chips, there’s a lot more to pregnancy and nutrition then just eating more calories.

Actually, it is really fortunate when you look at it a way other than through tastebuds that crave junk food. Knowing that we women have power to create beautiful babies who are healthful, who will never get ear infections or glasses or cholesterol problems is a fortunate thing! As Chris Masterjohn says, HERE, “Good maternal nutrition during pregnancy can protect the offspring from diabetes, stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, and memory loss later in life.”

We all hear about how when you are pregnant, a mom should not smoke or drink. That’s because the mom has an organ that passes everything she takes in on to the baby. This organ, the placenta, is the first tree of life to the baby. It supports the baby until the baby is born with oxygen and nutrients. It literally looks like a tree as well. How many of us realize the power of this tree of life? We can use this tree of life to pass on positive things to the baby to increase the baby’s facial beauty, bone structure and density, brain and eye development, gut health (which affects all other health) and to make an overall strong constitution for life.

Not only that, but through proper nutrition, we can decrease and even eliminate the common pesky complaints and challenges of pregnancy that we as moms experience such as:

• Morning sickness
• Cramping in your feet and hands
• Cravings for junk foods
• Varicose veins
• Stretch marks
• Swelling and water retention

In addition, a holistic IBCLC, Jennifer Tow,  over here, says that a mom’s diet can lead to all the common problems we hear about in modern America after someone has a baby. “…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.”

Wow, we moms have power to eliminate all these problems by changing our diets! This is good news!

Does it sound too good to be true? Read on! I have been blessed not to ever have morning sickness, but I have suffered through all of my pregnancies with extremely puffy feet and ankles towards the end of the pregnancy. That’s because I did not have the knowledge I am sharing with you now. How often I would look at my edematous feet and wish I could just pop them with a pin and let the fluid out. I am eager to apply this nutritional knowledge for the next time I am pregnant so I can have increased health and comfort.

My post about nutrition and pregnancy will weave in my discoveries in my journey of seven pregnancies, which span two decades. When I first started having babies, I read the book What to Eat When You Are Expecting.

The guidelines seemed fairly reasonable to me. It recommended cutting out all empty calories, especially those that come from food with white sugar. I guess I was in a very virtuous and  obedient phase of life and I dutifully swore off white sugar for my pregnancy. My friends even knew all about that and blessed me with a baby shower that involved raw veggies and no white sugar. Baby #1 was born very healthy. He is 18 years old now and just finished his first year of college on scholarship. I like to think that his smarts came from me eating no white sugar while I was pregnant with him.

I give credit to that book for helping me avoid white sugar. That’s one of the good pieces of nutritional advice it gives. But the book has problems. It recommends the typical diet recommended in the mainstream media of low fat, whole grains, vegetables and fruit, and even that evil fake fat margarine. That is a recipe for health disaster, especially if you are pregnant! I won’t go into any more details of the problems of the book, you can read a criticism here.

With Baby #2 I took a Bradley childbirth course. It was in that course that I learned about the work of Dr. Tom Brewer. Dr. Brewer found that diet in pregnant women made the difference as to whether women had problems with preeclampsia, also known as toxemia. If you don’t know what preeclampsia/ toxemia is, believe me when I say you don’t want to have that condition. It can be life-threatening. It involves high blood pressure. Think of Michelle Duggar with her last live baby, Josie Brooklyn. Michelle had complications with preeclampsia many weeks before the baby was due. She ended up being hospitalized and had an emergency C-section.The baby was born at about 25 weeks weighing only 1 pound. Thanks to God and modern medicine, Josie survived the premature birth and is alive today.

Fortunately, preeclampsia can be prevented! I am not here to criticize the Duggars, only to increase public awareness of how nutrition can prevent preeclampsia. (I think the Duggars are totally amazing. I stand in awe of their willingness to have so many children. Michelle is superhuman to me in her ability to remain so sweet, patient, and softspoken after having so many children. She is definitely one of my heroes.)  In his clinic, Dr. Brewer educated his OB patients on the importance of getting enough salt and protein. His patients followed the diet and did not have any problems with the preeclampsia. You can learn more
about the Brewer diet here, http://www.blueribbonbaby.org/ifyouarepregnant/daily-pregnancy-nutrition-checklist/

By following the Brewer diet, women can avoid the following problems: toxemia, preeclampsia, HELLP Syndrome, premature birth, low birth weight, and intrauterine growth retardation. As the web site says, these are not random issues. They are not genetic. They can be prevented with the Brewer diet.

It’s great that the Brewer diet recommends eggs and milk, however I wish that it emphasized the quality of the eggs and milk, i.e. eggs from cage-free chickens and raw milk, like the list at the bottom of this post. Anyway, I followed the Brewer Diet with Baby #2 and she was born happy and healthy, full-term. I have since learned that all of that pasteurized milk I took in caused a lot of mucus congestion in me and the baby. This baby had a lot stuffy noses and she was the only baby I’ve had with an ear infection. Many people find that raw milk does not cause the congestion that pasteurized milk does.

That’s what I knew when I was first having babies, but since then I have learned so much more. The next thing I learned is that you can grow a baby on a vegan diet, but I do not recommend it.  Veganism was popular in the late 1990s and I decided to become a vegan. The trouble was,  I was always hungry. I had to eat three and four servings of food at each meal when I became pregnant again. The resulting baby was 9 pounds at birth and healthy as far as I could tell. With two older children ages 2 and 4, I was either eating, nursing, doing dishes, or chasing kids. Not a very fun time in my life. That was baby #3. If only I had known that all these foods I thought were so healthful: organic produce and whole grains, legumes, olive oil, were a step in the right direction but missing some pieces. I also didn’t realize that all the soy milk I was using on my oatmeal and other whole grain cereals to replace milk was doing a number on my thyroid, which causes me to have hypothyroidism to this day. Soy milk and other soy foods have no place in our diet. Read more about soy here.

I was pretty much vegan with baby  #4 too.  I had heard the Mad Cowboy speak at a cottage meeting in my friend’s home, about the virtues of being vegan and that greatly influenced me. He was the former rancher who appeared on Oprah, exposing all the evils of the cattle industry, causing Oprah to say she would never eat another burger again.  I wanted to avoid the toxins in the mainstream meat processing industry. I did not know there was an alternative, that is, finding meat that is raised without hormones and antibiotics and being allowed to roam the range, free of cages or stalls.

By the time I was pregnant with baby #5, my home birth midwife gently suggested that I start eating meat. she said she had studied women who were vegan and vegetarian and found that with each successive baby the women and the babies were less and less healthy. I started eating meat, and I did feel better. I was starting to feel that I did not have to eat as much food at each meal..

The most important thing to know about diet in pregnancy is that you are growing a new brain. The brain is so important! It is what gives life and personality to your new baby. The brain controls the body. The brain needs food, and not any food, or just calories, but food that makes it work better. Enter the healthy fats.  These fats are so important because they allow the body to have access to Vitamins A and D. Vitamins A and D are only accessible or bioavailable to the body by being soluble in fat.

So before I delve into why Vitamin A and D are so important, let’s talk healthy fats. In this world of lipo, skinny supermodels, and six-pack abs, the word fat seems like a naughty word, but fat is actually needed by the body, to hold vitamin A and D, to provide building blocks for hormones, including hormones needed for sex and reproduction,  to provide myelination for nerve cells to allow connection between nerves, and to to help the brain function. Fat also gives a sense of satisfaction, fullness, and pleasure. It slows down the digestion of carbs, allowing you to feel fuller sooner, so that you are less likely to overeat.

The following are the healthy fats for you to put in your kitchen, put in your body, and raise your new baby on. These are the healthy fats for you and your family to thrive on! In short, healthy fat makes you happy and well! An added bonus to eating sufficient healthy fats is that cravings for sugar goes down. Watch the video above and read below to learn more about them.

1. Cod liver oil. Mary Poppins was right, a daily dose of cod liver oil is good for children, and just as good for adults, especially childbearing women. Pregnant and lactating woman should take 1 tbsp.  a day. You don’t have to gag it down either. You can get cod liver oil flavored with licorice, cinnamon, orange, and sweetened with stevia, at greenpastures.org. Get these Kid Tested Cod Liver Oils here

It will provide you with vitamin A, which we will go into later, and also omega fatty acids, which can greatly decrease the chances of having post partum depression.

2. Coconut oil. Despite the negative press given to tropical oils, coconut oil is actually very good for you. It is full of
lauric acid, which is a super germ fighter. It fights bacteria, viruses, yeast, and other fungi.

3. Animal fat. A little animal fat is good for everyone. See HERE to learn about nutritional deficiencies caused by vegetarianism.

4. Olive oil. Olive oil has natural nutrients and is a healthy fat (as long as it is cold-pressed) that is liquid at room temperature so it is perfect for homemade salad dressings.

5. Butter
Forget limiting your butter to two pats a day. Butter on vegetables makes them taste better, and it makes the Vitamins A and D in the vegetables actually stay in your body. As Sally Fallon says, “My body is a temple. The vitamins and minerals are the bricks, and the healthy fat is the mortar.” In other words, healthy fat makes Vitamin A and D stick inside the body to hold the bone structure together, and not get washed out by a low-fat diet.

These are the healthy fats that abound in nature. They come from the earth and animals that graze the earth. The reason you don’t hear about them much is because the companies that synthesize fake fat  in the factory have more money than the farmers and olive oil producers.  Probably the best thing you could do for your health and your future baby’s health is to ditch all the factory fats in your cupboards. These include soybean, vegetable oil, crisco, shortening, corn oil, and any other oil other than coconut or olive. Even that much-promoted-oil that so many “health nuts” seem to adore, canola oil. Canola oil is highly processed, jut as these other oils are. They come from an extraction process that uses high heat and toxic solvents. Canola oil is a made up name, it comes from “Canadian oil.” It comes from the rapeseed plant. The names rapeseed oil did not market well so the oil manufacturers changed the name to canola. Another apt name for it is “con-ola” as the oil manufacturers conned the American public into thinking it is healthful. See the canola story here.

Vitamin A is needed by your developing baby for the development of the eyes, brain, and nervous system. Sufficient Vitamin A ingestion while you are pregnant will protect your child against vision problems, and learning disabilities. Again, 1 tbsp a day is recommended for pregnant women. Vitamin A stores are depleted by your growing baby during pregnancy, so Sally Fallon, a nutrition advocate and founder of the Weston A Price foundation,  see the WAPF site here, recommends a three year spacing until the next baby to allow your body to build up vitamin A stores for the next baby.

To illustrate the importance of vitamin A, take a look at this article. It found that firstborn children are more intelligent. Here’s what blogger Sarah Pope, the woman in the nutrition videos on this post, says about the article, “The real reason that eldest children typically have higher aptitude and better health than later borns is because they get the benefit of all of Mom’s nutritional stores, primarily the fat soluble vitamins A and D.    Later borns get the nutritional dregs, so to speak.   Fat soluble vitamins take time to rebuild in the tissues and unless Mom makes a concerted effort to replenish these stores between pregnancies, the health and ability of later children will very likely suffer as a consequence.” See her post here http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/birth-order-and-intelligence/.

Decades ago the Cleveland  zoo had a problem. The lions in the zoo were not able to reproduce in
captivity. So the zookeeper went to Africa to observe lions in the wild to see what his lions
were missing. he noticed that these lions, after killing their prey, would immediately go for
the internal organs of the liver. He went back to Cleveland and started feeding liver to the captive
lions and voila, a while later, the zoo finally got some lion babies. The liver is a highly concentrated storehouse of vitamins A and D, that’s why it was so good for the lions to eat. You may be thinking, yuck, liver, as I do. But I have
been assured that when you eat liver from a quality meat source that was raised free range on green grass, the liver is very tender and delicious.

Dr. Weston a price, a dentist from the 1930s, traveled the world to study native people and their diets. he studied 14 traditional tribes. He found that these tribes all had healthy babies with no birth defects, no crooked teeth, no impacted wisdom teeth, and no chronic illnesses like asthma or juvenile diabetes. He noticed these tribes had the following in common. The tribes ate:

1. food produced by nature (no white sugar or white flour)

2. traditionally prepared grains (soaked in acidic medium to neutralize the phytic acid, nature’s preservative so that the grain doesn’t spoil, or sprouted)
3. some animal food

4. lacto fermented foods. These foods encourage the healthy bacteria in the gut which keep yeast down.

Dr. Price found that the foods these native people ate had at least ten times the amount of Vitamins A and D, and another nutrient, Activator X, which was later identified to be Vitamin K2, as in industrial diets . These vitamins work synergistically together to provide optimal health.

He also found that the people either soaked their grains or sprouted them to make the minerals in the grains more absorbable.

Here is a video about how to soak grain so that it is traditionally prepared.

Another thing he noticed was that every tribe treated the newly married women and pregnant women with special diets. These people instinctively knew special food was needed for a growing fetus. They used liver, seafood, or insects. These are all sources of vitamin A and D. if the tribes lived close to the sea they used seafood to get the vitamin A, if they lived in land-locked areas they used animal milk and insects. For example. the Masai tribe in Africa would not let young woman get married until the time of the year when the cows were pasturing
on rapidly growing grass, and give that milk to the young woman. This insured high amounts of Vitamin A and D, to improve the chances of the young women being fertile and having healthy babies.

Vitamin A is a magic nutrient that growing fetuses and children need. It allows for wide facial structure, with enough room for all the teeth, including wisdom teeth. It builds healthy bones and teeth. Our society’s lack of vitamin A has produced generations of children who are tall without being sturdy (lanky), who are myopic, and have overcrowded teeth.

Starting with Baby #5 I was no longer vegetarian or vegan. But I did not know about the magic of Vitamin A and did not take cod liver oil to replenish my Vitamin A stores in my body. Babies #5 and #6 were born healthy and full term. Both of them, however, were underweight by the time they were a year old. They did not have the chubby rolls of fat my older children had as babies. I have often wondered if my milk supply did not provide as much fat for them as it did for my older children because my nutritional stores were dwindling. They were also 18 months apart. I allowed a 3 1/2 year gap for Baby #7. He is nearing three years old and is not underweight. Maybe it’s because my nutritional stores increased with a bigger gap between babies.

When you are pregnant, it’s more important than ever to have every bite count, so that you don’t gain too much weight. As someone who has gained as much as 80 lbs in a pregnancy, I can witness to the fact that excess weight at the end of pregnancy makes it more miserable than it has to be! It is important to gain weight, true, but too much weight can make a mom very uncomfortable. Although if I had to err on either side I would choose too much weight, to insure that my baby had enough.  A growing fetus makes you hungry, so you eat. The more nutrient dense the food is, the less food you will need to eat to feel full,
nourished, and satisfied. So you will be less likely to gain too much weight.

Below is the full diet that the Weston A. Price foundation recommends for pregnant and nursing moms. These are the nutrient dense foods that will allow your body to create a beautiful and healthy baby. In Dr. Price’s book, pictured above, he tells the story of a woman who had a baby after a 53 hour labor. This baby girl grew up to have crooked teeth. The mom decided to have another baby, but this time she ate a different diet that involved cod liver oil, green vegetables, and liberal amounts of raw milk and butter that came from cows that were grassfed. This time, the mother’s labor was less 3 hours, and the baby girl had perfect uncrooked teeth. The story starts on p. 405 of the edition pictured above.

This is copied from the WAPF site:

Healthy Diet for Pregnant and Nursing Moms

Cod Liver Oil to supply 20,000 IU vitamin A and 2000 IU vitamin D per day

1 quart (or 32 ounces) whole milk daily, preferably raw and from pasture-fed cows (learn more about raw milk on our website, A Campaign for Real Milk, www.realmilk.com)

4 tablespoons butter daily, preferably from pasture-fed cows

2 or more eggs daily, preferably from pastured chickens

Additional egg yolks daily, added to smoothies, salad dressings, scrambled eggs, etc.

3-4 ounces fresh liver, once or twice per week (If you have been told to avoid liver for fear of getting “too much Vitamin A,” be sure to read Vitamin A Saga)

Fresh seafood, 2-4 times per week, particularly wild salmon, shellfish and fish eggs

Fresh beef or lamb daily, always consumed with the fat

Oily fish or lard daily, for vitamin D

2 tablespoons coconut oil daily, used in cooking or smoothies, etc.

Lacto-fermented condiments and beverages

Bone broths used in soups, stews and sauces

Soaked whole grains

Fresh vegetables and fruits

Bone broth is really good for pregnant women because it provides lots of minerals that are highly absorbable. Bone broth also adds glucosamine which is very good at keeping your joints healthy. Then the gelatin in the bone broth helps your gut ecology fight infection. Here’s a video on how to make bone broth. Sorry about the Obama commercial at the beginning, click on “skip ad” on the bottom right.

AVOID:

• Trans fatty acids (e.g., hydrogenated oils)
• Junk foods
• Commercial fried foods
• Sugar
• White flour
• Soft drinks
• Caffeine
• Alcohol
• Cigarettes
• Drugs (even prescription drugs)

IMPORTANT WARNING: Cod liver oil contains substantial levels of omega-3 EPA, which can cause numerous health problems, such as hemorrhaging during the birth process, if not balanced by arachidonic acid (ARA), an omega-6 fatty acid found in liver, egg yolks and meat fats.  Please do not add cod liver oil to a diet that is deficient in these important animal foods. It is important to follow our diet for pregnant mothers in its entirety, not just selected parts of it.

Here is a healthy pregnancy powerpoint by Sally Fallon to sum up what I have shared.

Women are much like the lions I wrote about who were captive in the zoo, unable to reproduce. We may be infertile or we may be unable to reproduce the sturdy, robust children of generations ago who were free of chronic illnesses, ADD, myopia, crooked teeth, impacted wisdom teeth, and degenerative diseases. Instead of being captive in a zoo, women today are in captivity by the media and government diet dictocrats as to what is healthy food for pregnancy. Let’s shake off the chains of ignorance and mainstream media to become free to have brilliant, healthy children! Go here to look at some beautiful babies raised on a healthy traditional diet and get inspired!