I want to talk about pregnancy nutrition.
I recently posted a video about my near-death childbirth experience in 2000.
I am utterly convinced I had such a terrible time giving birth to my twins because of what I ate during my pregnancy.
I met someone likeminded
And then, the other day, I was talking to someone at a networking meeting, and she related an anecdote about what happened to her after the birth of her first child.
It went something like this; she haemorrhaged after the birth and was scheduled for a blood transfusion the next day. But when they tested her beforehand, they were surprised to find that her blood was fine and the transfusion wasn’t needed. And she was utterly convinced that it was due to her husband cooking her a large steak each week of her final trimester.
This was also music to my ears.
Why would this matter?
Of course this excellent source of heme (bioavailable) iron stood her in good stead in her hour of need.
What does it have to do with my work?
So much of my work is rectifying the common myths about what we need to be eating to give us great personal health (including assuring people that red meat is brilliant, contrary to ever more popular belief).
Let alone trying to grow another human (or two in my case) inside us.
Pregnant women are warned off other fantastic foods.
Between us we bemoaned the conventional advice to avoid liver, shellfish and blue and unpasteurised cheese during pregnancy.
As for me, I still find it a total miracle that my children were healthy, in fact they were whoppers for twins, at 7lbs each.
I wholeheartedly believe that my miracle body gave up everything it could to help them grow correctly, whereas I was to become a casualty of the poor choices I made in the 9 month lead up.
What the hell did I eat that was so bad?
The foods I ate were made up almost entirely of ultra processed foods. Ready meals, mostly Birds Eye Chilli con carne, and family sized rice crispy cakes.
My thoughts were, hooray, no need for dieting!
My thinking (and excuse) was that I was eating for three! Which resulted in my 5’4” frame weighing over 16 stone after they were born.
But I was drinking skimmed milk so it wasn’t all bad was it?
The only conscious nod to eating for my growing babies was that I drank a pint of skimmed milk a day.
And now I know that the calcium I thought I was consuming couldn’t be absorbed because the fat had been removed!
And so it goes on.
And yet we’re still told to make this choice over whole milk (the clue is in the word ‘whole’!).
Many of my friends have gone on to have tough birthing experiences.
I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the standard UK diet, the one I rail against in my mission to show everyone that it’s just not up to the job of building us from the inside out.
And is certainly not up to building the next generation of humans.
I now know that I didn’t set my children up for good early health.
My son was obese until aged 17 and my daughter had acne.
The great news is that we can rectify poor maternal nutrition once they are born.
Luckily my change in thinking has since helped these issues and repopulated their guts with the bacteria that they should have been born with.
The only way we are going to improve the health outcomes for all future generations is if we have the best food to support both mother and child.
You know what I’m going to say those are.
Meat, fish, dairy, eggs, nuts and leafy green vegetables of course.
