What Is The Best Diet For Pregnancy?

what’s the best nutrition for pregnant women for sure yeah and so that I am a testament for and you know nine amazing months of pregnancy working every day and exercise and you know not having any limitations and giving birth right my babies fly out of me and so you know absolutely one time I tried to eat cooked food and I got past Eid reflux I was a heck with that because that’s very painful and as soon as I got back to raw food I was fine and you know being pregnant you need you don’t eat for two but you eat very well and in an art form we do juice so we have like 16 ounces twice a day of amazing amount of nourishment we put our sunflower pea sprouts or celery cucumber parsley kale cabbage whatever you want to add onto that and then we have big salads and so we drink plenty of water and you know it’s absolutely the best diet and a lot of pregnant women have come through our program and without the fertility and the fertility oh so many couples have come who tried everything to get pregnant even their hormones and their infertility programs and they many have got pregnant after is it we just had one she said three months after we came to the Institute and went through the program I got pregnant so we called him Hippocrates babies so there’s a lot of Hippocrates babies out there and one lady came on in her eighth month and she told us that she wanted to stay for a month and I’m like well I’m not gonna deliver but we made it she made it home to New York she I’m from New York and we’ve had them come and stay and deliver babies well we didn’t deliver we have made why not me but and I have midwives and which is a wonderful thing when you give birth you have a midwife that’s like having a sister who is with you through the whole thing and the whole pregnancy I highly recommend anybody to have a midwife even if you give birth in the hospital of course home birth is the ideal but if you have some medical problems during pregnancy you bring your midwife with you and she will take care of you so this lady came and she had severe Candida yeast infection and they were going to put her on have heavy diflucan and medications like that and she didn’t want to cause any problem for the baby so she came and of course she was fruit free and she did the program she had an amazing time amazing delivery made it back home to New York but so it is the perfect diet for pregnancy but I’m not talking just a plate of lettuce cucumber and tomato that’s not gonna make it sprouts have their hormones you know they it has the phytonutrients have oxygen have enzyme it is it’s the best baby ever could get so you’re giving an amazing time for the nine months that their baby is in the womb and you know at that time your brain barrier your brain barrier by the way is open until you about mid-20s but it’s really open in those days so anything the mother eats gets right in through the brain barrier so if I’m smoking of course that goes right into the brain barrier like my mother did because my mother now you’re talking in the 50s women were told that it was perfectly fine to smoke when you were pregnant but we know better now but still it I see a lot of young women smoke when they’re pregnant and I mean that that’s horrendous because it goes straight in we have children now that are totally addicted to opioids so much that they are put on methadone the first three months of their life because it’s horrendous what they have to go through to detoxify the drugs that their mother took so everything that we do matters and imagine the gift you give when you’re giving this kind of food this kind of nourishment I mean it’s it’s amazing so every mother that has gone through it this way will be a testament to that so you know you can throw away a lot of ideas of what we’ve had in pregnancy in the past and I hope that we have a whole generation that will listen to this and take advantage of ants advice from this and fruit fruit is ok it’s ok of course prenatal supplements every woman should take pre-made prenatal and maybe some more extra plant iron to add and you know usually b12 of course and and all the beads are very important folic acid so but these are things you also start before you get pregnant so that you have a good base so so it’s absolutely the best because you’re a physician in Australia and I know in in Chinese medicine that there is a different thinking about raw and cooked food and yin and yang and all of that and so I’m just curious where when you heard that pregnant women shouldn’t consume raw foods if that came from Chinese medicine or where that came from maybe it was microbes on it or something oh okay I I think that’s I I know exactly what you’re talking about knowing you’re in you’re right what they’re talking about is is that they they do tell pregnant women they shouldn’t eat sprouts and the reason for that is that a sprouts when you think about the way that sprouts grow they grow in a very moist warm environment and so that’s the environment that would breed bacteria and so one of the foods that has the highest risk of contamination and and and you do not want to get food poisoning when you’re pregnant is sprouts and so so when you’re buying sprouts from a store or from a person that you know your seeds need to be clean when you’re sprouting and of course you know a lot more about sprouting than I do but but it’s a you certainly there’s ways of ensuring your sprouts are not contaminated and so it’s more about when you’re purchasing from a grocery store there’s that risk because some of the worst outbreaks of food poisoning have been you know you really blamed on or caused by sprouts that were improperly sprouted or the or word we’re not clean sprouts and so that’s what we’re talking about so not I think the doctor wasn’t talking about all raw foods they were specifically talking about sprouts and then the other question about nutrition and pregnancy and and of course I come from a little bit more of a I don’t know if you call it a conservative or or mainstream tradition with with nutrition and pregnancy but I think it can be done in a variety of ways depending on what you know what a person feels comfortable with but from a perspective of plant-based nutrition there are a number of nutrients and anna-marie you know alluded to a lot of these that we need to be especially cautious about so during pregnancy you want to make sure that you’re meeting your needs for all nutrients and the ones that you need to pay special attention to especially if you’re going more towards a raw diet is there’s a source of course b12 as you mentioned vitamin D iodine iron zinc iodine is extremely important and some people doing a raw food diet who and or even vegan who are not using you know iodized salt or any seaweeds or so there they they and especially in Europe where the soil is quite poor in iodine they may end up short on iodine and that’s not a good thing during pregnancy so an even protein you know you need a little bit more protein because you’re growing this whole little new being so you need to design your diet that would in a way that that would ensure all of those are met and you know in our in the books that vesanto and I have written we’ve got plans to ensure that that all of those bases are absolutely covered one of the great benefits of you know going through pregnancy and lactation as as a vegan or plant-based person is the levels of persistent organic pollutants in breast milk are so much lower than they are in an omnivorous diet like give them some numbers it’s like shocking it’s shocking it’s I know in the farm study years ago I think there was one percent of the levels that there was in the milk of omnivores so it’s the tremendous advantage and then of course the other nutrient to be to be thinking about us is fat and we need healthy fats during pregnancy but of course enough essential fatty acids and even though women it’s interesting there was a researcher in the UK by the name of dr. Burge and he did two studies that I thought were absolutely fascinating looking at conversion of alpha-linolenic acid into epa and DHA and he looked at a group of young men and then he looked at a group of young women and the young men converted I believe it was nine percent to EPA and nine percent to DPA which is an intermediary between EPA and DHA and DHA they didn’t convert any zero percent and but the total was about eighteen percent conversion when they looked at young women it was different I think it was nine percent to DHA and even more – EP a and then somewhere in between for the DPA but a total of about 36% conversion and the thinking was that that young women have to be prepared for the possibility of of having to grow a new little brain and and so they their bodies need to be converting more readily than other people in the life including and and the one thing about the DHA that I wonder is is if in men when they’re testing blood for example um you don’t want a ton of DHA floating around your blood it’s a highly unstable fat so that it gets sucked into the tissues very very rapidly and and that you only convert when you need the DHA and so that’s why men you know it’s just a theory but there’s there’s obviously a reason why the DHA for men came out so low now the other thing to know with vegans is even though our levels of epa and DHA are significantly lower than they are in omnivores we are able to maintain the consistent levels over many years there was another study out of the UK that even after I think it was 20 years plus those levels were still they don’t just keep going down down down the conversion seems to be reasonably adequate over time as we age we maintain it more so so these are all considerations but even with that having been said I would still consider because we there’s so many questions and we want to maximize our epa DHA status when we’re pregnant and lactating of taking some sort of a supplement during pregnancy and lactation