The Better Baby Book (8 page)

Even if you find natural cured or precooked meats that are nitrate- and nitrite-free, these meats are among the highest-risk foods for
Listeria
contamination. Like cheeses, cured and precooked meat products often sit in display cases for a while, making most of them “old food” before you even buy them.

Certain Herbs

There are certain herbs that stimulate abnormal hormonal activity in the body. Some of them even stimulate and relax the uterus, which may cause premature birth. Here's a list of herbs to avoid during pregnancy: barberry, blue cohosh, celandine, dong quai, ephedra, ginseng, goldenseal, guarana, kola nut, passion flower, pau d'arco, pennyroyal, Roman chamomile, saw palmetto, and yohimbe.

Black cohosh is an herb that supports normal uterine function and menstrual cycles. We don't think it should be used during pregnancy without the oversight of a professional midwife, doctor, or health-care practitioner. The primary places to look out for these herbs are herbal teas and natural cosmetics. Beyond these sources, you probably won't come into contact with them.

Canned Food

The cans that are used to package foods contain a plastic resin lining that frequently contains bisphenol-A (BPA). Acidic canned foods, like tomatoes, are especially risky because the acidity encourages the BPA to leach into the food. Unless you're sure the resin lining is BPA-free, dehydrated or shrink-wrapped food or food in a jar is a safer way to consume preserved foods. Traditional canning in glass containers is a great way to preserve food, but like any hand-canned product, botulism is a risk to consider. Commercial canned foods often contain lots of preservatives as well.

Old Food

Ayurvedic tradition holds that eating old food, or “leftovers,” creates poor digestion. We tested this idea by going a month without eating cooked leftovers. Of course, we avoided eating leftovers at home, but to avoid them completely we had to learn that old food is frequently disguised as fresh food, including anything in your local grocery store that is the following:

• Perishable
  
• Precooked
  
• Prepackaged cooked “fresh” food
  
• Unfrozen “ready to eat”
  
• “Fresh” deli-style meats, cheeses and other foods that sit in a display case
  

Leftovers also include almost all restaurant foods, which are usually precooked or prepared as much as several days in advance.

When our monthlong trial period was over, we definitely noticed better digestion and higher energy levels. Lana especially noticed higher energy during both pregnancies. We felt so much better that neither of us eats any old food anymore. Even when dealing with fresh food, we're more careful about how we store it. If it can be frozen, we freeze it and use it directly out of the freezer.

We suspect that old food is harmful because it's so easily contaminated with bacteria and mold. Although fresh food has some ability to resist bacterial and fungal colonies, once the food is cooked, that ability is lost. Cooking destroys most bacteria and mold spores, but when the food sits on the table, spores from the air recolonize it quickly. As soon as you put leftovers in the refrigerator, bacteria or fungi start growing again.

Making economical use of leftovers can be important in meeting a budget. Healthy food is expensive, and waste is waste—we're certainly not recommending that. Our solution was to practice cooking just the right amount of food so we didn't have leftovers or waste anymore. After a week or two, we got pretty good at it! If time constraints and budget won't allow for this and you must use leftovers, at least freeze them right away and heat them up without a microwave, directly out of the freezer.

Conventional Produce

Conventional produce (as opposed to organic produce) is fresh fruits and vegetables raised with pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides (farming chemicals). These toxic chemicals are sprayed on almost all conventional produce while it's growing. They help crops to grow and to avoid destruction from pests, predatory plants and weeds, and fungi and molds. Although it's great that these chemicals help crops to grow, unfortunately they stay in the produce permanently and pose a threat to people.

You can avoid most of these sprays by buying USDA organic produce, which is required to be free of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. The most heavily sprayed produce are apples, cantaloupe (Mexican), carrots, celery, cherries, coffee, cucumbers, grapes (imported), green and red bell peppers, green beans, kale, lettuce, nectarines, peaches, pears, spinach, and strawberries. By making sure you eat these products organic only, you can cut your exposure to farm chemicals by about 80 percent.

The following produce is generally safe to buy conventional: asparagus, avocados, bananas, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, eggplant, grapes (domestic), kiwi, mangoes, papaya, pineapple, plums, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and watermelon. We think avocados are the safest conventional produce on the market.

Foods with Added Chemicals or Conditioners

Chemicals and conditioners are used in processed foods for countless reasons. So many unique agents are used that we'll just list the categories here: acidifiers, alkalizers, antibiotics, anticaking and antifoaming agents, bleaches, buffers, chemical (artificial) flavors, clarifiers, defoliants, deodorants, disinfectants, drugs, drying agents, dyes and colorings like cochineal or titanium dioxide, emulsifiers, expanders, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrolyzers, modifiers, moisteners, neutralizers, noxious sprays, stabilizers, steroids, synthetic hormones, synthetic vitamins that are barely usable by the body, and thickeners like carrageenan and propylene glycol. Not all of these additives are harmful, but studies have suggested that more than 90 percent of them are. If you see them on a product label, it's probably best to avoid the product.

Processed Foods

By “processed foods” we mean foods that for some reason aren't natural. Processed foods include the following:

• Genetically modified foods
  
• Foods containing hydrogenated oils (trans fat)
  
• Pasteurized or homogenized foods
  
• Prepared foods
  
• Crops grown with herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides
  
• Foods containing preservatives, artificial sweeteners (such as aspartame), or flavor enhancers (such as MSG)
  
• Foods containing a variety of chemical agents
  

Even though we detailed these topics earlier in the chapter, we find it helpful to group them together under “processed foods” because they're easier to remember that way.

5

Nourishing a Healthy Brain and Body

Thinking about changing your diet can be intimidating, but the payoff for eating a healthy, toxin-free diet is worth it. This chapter tells you how to do it.

The basis for a healthy diet is—yes!—fat. The belief that a low-fat diet is healthy is based on the assumption that all types of fat are the same, which is completely mistaken. The truth is that all fats are not created equal. There are good fats and bad fats, and in this chapter we will help you to distinguish between the two, which is important because pregnant women who try to minimize all fat in their diet do so at the risk of great harm to themselves and their babies.

Fat is one of the main building blocks of your body—and your baby's body. The body's brain, cell walls, and hormones are composed mostly of fat. Toxin-free healthy fats are some of the most nutrient-packed foods available; the issue is knowing where to find them. Your body metabolizes healthy fats more efficiently and with fewer waste products than either carbohydrates or proteins. Eating healthy fats keeps your baby's brain growing, gives you a feeling of satiety, and maintains your weight at optimal levels. If you make healthy fat a primary part of your diet, you actually
reduce
your risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Similarly, if you minimize your consumption of bad fats, you maximize your own health and increase your chances of giving birth to a vibrantly healthy baby with optimal brain development.

The research supporting a high-protein, healthy-fat diet goes back more than 150 years, and it took just 5 years to assemble it into more than 500 pages of plain English. We didn't have to do that, because Gary Taubes, the author of
Good Calories, Bad Calories
, already did. If our diet recommendations make you uncomfortable, you owe it to yourself—and your baby—to read his book. It supports our diet, which works for pregnant women, women seeking to get pregnant, and men working to build the healthiest sperm. And the basic principles apply to just about everybody at all stages of life. Here are some of the facts supporting our recommendations:

Facts about Fats

• The best fats are saturated and monounsaturated. Such fats are found in egg yolks, butter from grass-fed cows, coconut, meat from healthy grass-fed animals, avocados, olives, and nuts.
  
• Coconut oil is high in healthy saturated fats. These healthy fats optimize cholesterol levels, help our immune systems to fight intruders, contribute to healthy brain and hormone formation, and are an excellent source of energy.
  
• Omega-3 fatty acids, which are plentiful in wild caught salmon and the yolks of eggs from free-range hens, soothe the body by reducing inflammation, protecting us from exposure to too much omega-6, improving blood circulation, optimizing blood pressure, and healing scar tissue.
  
• Chemically processed omega-6 fatty acids are found in soy, canola, corn, and vegetable oils. Natural forms are found in nuts, vegetables, and grains. We need a small amount of omega-6, but this is overly abundant in the standard Western diet, which is rich in unhealthy oils and grains. In addition, omega-6 oxidizes easily, which makes eating it especially unhealthy when it's cooked.
  
• Fats that are oxidized, hydrogenated (trans fat), or contaminated by mycotoxins—including many of the fats used in processed food, margarine, and so-called butter spreads and substitutes—can cause heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. In the previous chapter, you learned how to avoid these fats. Our diet includes none of them.
  

Facts about Carbohydrates

• Carbohydrates in the form of fructose (fruit sugar), refined or whole grains, and other starches make you hungry, slow your metabolism so that you burn fewer calories, and lower your physical activity levels. They do the same for your fetus.
  
• Carbohydrates contribute to obesity (and later heart disease) because they lower insulin sensitivity, which results in a higher overall insulin level and a tendency to store fat. When insulin sensitivity gets very low, it's called insulin resistance, which is one step away from type 2 diabetes. Pregnant women need to be particularly concerned about high insulin levels because they may lead to a dangerous condition called pregnancy-related diabetes.
  
• Conventional advice tells us to eat fruit and vegetables, always mentioning the two in one breath as though they are equally beneficial, but the truth is that fruits contain different types and amounts of sugar than vegetables do. The type of sugar in fruit (fructose) lowers insulin sensitivity and raises some risk factors for heart disease (like triglycerides), whereas the type of sugar in vegetables (glucose) does not.
  
• Exercise causes weight loss not so much because it burns calories but primarily because it increases insulin sensitivity. Higher insulin sensitivity means a lower overall insulin level, and less insulin means less fat storage.
  

The Food Pyramid

This is what the famous food pyramid should really look like:

When we described our diet to friends who were also expectant mothers, we often heard two things. First they would exclaim, “Fat! Are you sure? I gained thirty-five pounds with my first baby, and I still haven't lost the last ten pounds!” Or if this was her first pregnancy, the woman always had a sister, a friend, or a colleague who was still battling the baby weight, months and even years later. Fat was the last thing she was going to put on her plate. After the initial disbelief, the second question was “If I shouldn't eat grains, legumes, processed foods, or even very much fruit, what am I supposed to eat?”

That's why this book uses both a food pyramid and a pie chart. The food pyramid shows the number of daily servings we recommend of various foods, and the pie chart shows the percentage of total daily calories those foods should constitute. The pie chart shows us that fat, being a very calorie-dense food, should make up the largest percentage of calories in your diet. The pyramid shows us that vegetables, being composed mostly of water and containing relatively few calories, should make up the largest number of servings in your diet. You have to eat a lot of them to get the nutrients they offer, which are different nutrients from those found in meat.

In this chapter, we identify the healthiest foods you can find—the foods that should be the cornerstones of your lifelong diet even if you're not planning a pregnancy. For each food, we detail why our recommendation makes sense, offer tips about the healthiest ways to prepare it, and tell you how to work it into your routine. If you're already convinced, go to the end of this chapter to find the diagrams listing these healthy foods.

Eggs

Organic eggs from free-range hens are loaded with valuable nutrients, and Lana ate countless eggs during both pregnancies. Tryptophan, selenium, iodine, phosphorus, riboflavin, choline, folate, lutein, zeaxanthin, vitamin D, and lots of good protein and fats are just a few of the reasons to eat healthy eggs. Most of the nutrients in the egg are in the yolk, along with half of the protein and all of the healthy fat.

One egg contains six grams of protein—three in the yolk and three in the white. This protein is of excellent quality because it contains all of the essential amino acids, distributed in almost perfect proportions. Eggs help young adults to construct stronger muscles and older adults to prevent muscle loss. The protein in properly prepared eggs is wonderful raw material that supports a baby's growth. Eggs support eye health because they contain forms of lutein that are very bioavailable. Eggs are also high in B vitamins, a class of vitamins that plays a big role in the development of a baby's nervous system. Finally, eggs are rich in iron, which guards against anemia.

In terms of pregnancy, perhaps the most important thing about eggs is the choline found in the yolk. Choline is an essential nutrient that is known to be an integral part of a baby's brain development. It also guards against birth defects. The National Academy of Sciences suggests 450 milligrams of choline per day for pregnant women and 550 milligrams per day for breast-feeding mothers. A pregnant woman can get almost half of the minimum daily choline she needs—250 milligrams—from two eggs, but we recommend exceeding minimum recommendations by a large margin because our goal is to optimize health, not simply to prevent malnutrition. Eggs aren't our only source of choline (so you don't need to eat four or more eggs every day), but they're a great source.

It turns out that choline is beneficial for everyone. In adults, choline is key to cell function (especially neural function), liver metabolism, and disease prevention. For example, a 2008 study linked high choline intake with a 24 percent lower rate of breast cancer. Women over nineteen need 425 milligrams every day, and men over nineteen need 550 milligrams. Research has found that only one in ten Americans gets enough choline every day.

Many people believe that eggs are unhealthy because they are high in cholesterol, but the facts suggest otherwise. There is cholesterol in eggs, but eating it won't harm you unless you oxidize it by overcooking it. That's why we recommend eating yolks soft-cooked or raw but not hard-cooked. A 2006 study in Britain found that eggs have not been linked with heart disease. In 2007, another study found that ninety-five hundred people eating one or more eggs every day did not experience a greater rate of heart disease or stroke. The study also found that eating eggs actually decreased blood pressure. Yet another study, also from 2007, concluded that recommendations to limit egg intake were not based on scientific evidence. It seems that “eggs are bad” is one of those myths based on questionable science from decades ago, but one that refuses to die.

Eating eggs will also help you to avoid excess weight gain before, during, and after pregnancy. Eggs contain a great balance of healthy fat and protein, so eating them helps you to feel both energized and satisfied. The more satisfied you feel, the less you'll be tempted to snack on empty calories like carbohydrates.

There is little or no downside to adding eggs to a Better Baby diet, but there is a significant upside.

Healthy Hens Make Healthy Eggs

As healthy as good eggs are, some eggs are much better for you than others, for all eggs are not created equal. Hens, just like humans, can produce healthy eggs only if their diet and environment are healthy. This means that they are able to graze outside in an organic field. As our local egg seller says, “They eat what they can find: bugs, grasses, seeds, and worms.” The nutrients from pasture grasses, bugs, and sun exposure make the eggs much healthier than commercial eggs from hens raised in confinement, fed poor-quality feed, and deprived of sun exposure.

Experiments done in 1933 found that chickens fed only soy, corn, wheat, or cottonseed meal didn't even lay eggs. They were simply not healthy enough. If, however, they were permitted access to fresh pasture grass and bugs in addition to the feed, they started laying eggs again. The nutrients in the pasture grass and bugs are essential.

Later studies found that eggs from free-range hens are richer in a variety of nutrients than those from factory-farmed hens. In 1974, a British study discovered that free-range eggs were much higher in folate and vitamin B12. In 1998, researchers discovered that free-range eggs have 30 percent more vitamin E than commercial eggs do. And, in 2007,
Mother Earth News
published a study it conducted comparing the nutrient content of eggs sampled from fourteen free-range farms across the United States with the nutrient content of eggs from hens raised in confinement. The findings were impressive. The free-range eggs contained 66 percent more vitamin A, twice the amount of omega-3 fatty acids, and a remarkable seven times more beta-carotene.

Free-range eggs are pretty easy to find these days, so we strongly recommend buying them to give yourself and your baby all these extra health benefits. They also taste better! Sadly, “free range” from stores usually come from chickens that did not actually have access to outdoor organic pastures to feed on their natural diet of grasses and bugs. “Cage-free” eggs can come from birds raised indoors, in overcrowded conditions and without access to the outdoors. The yolks of free-range eggs will typically be a much richer, deeper yellow than the yolks of commercial eggs. When deeper color is natural in a food, it's often an indication of high nutrient content.

Egg Warnings

Salmonella
contamination of eggs is all over the news these days. In 2010, half a billion eggs from Iowa were recalled. Knowing the health benefits of eggs, we decided to look at the risks versus the rewards, and we're convinced that the benefits of eating raw egg yolks far outweigh the risk of
Salmonella
, especially if you take the simple precautions we describe here.

The rate of
Salmonella
contamination in eggs is about one in twenty thousand. That's incredibly low. This is an average for all eggs, including commercially raised factory-farm eggs, which make up the vast majority of what's on the market. The organic free-range eggs we recommend are safer because the organic environment produces healthier chickens that better resist disease and infection. Most of the time,
Salmonella
is not going to be on healthy eggs that were properly refrigerated. And if it is, it's likely to be on the shell and not inside the egg unless the shell is cracked. In that case, any
Salmonella
that was present on the outside of the shell will infect the inside of the egg. For this reason, we never eat eggs that have been cracked, even if the crack is slight. We urge any pregnant woman to use the same caution and recommend you wash your eggs before cracking them.