The Better Baby Book (4 page)

One of the keys to a successful pregnancy is realizing that your baby is sensing and feeling from the very moment of conception and that these sensations and feelings change how your baby grows. We said
conception
, not
birth
. How your baby perceives the womb environment plays an integral role in his or her development. Although your fetus may not have full sensory capacities like hearing or seeing until a few months after conception, what you say, think, breathe, eat, and feel has a huge effect even before the senses develop.

Psychologists who study intelligence know that there is a complex interaction between intelligence and emotional development. For us, doing the best we could for our children meant not only having a smarter baby but also having an emotionally healthy baby, who can grow up to become an emotionally healthy adult. There was a time in both of our lives when we'd have read that sentence and thought, “What? Babies can't even remember what happens to them at birth—this is ludicrous.” We would have been wrong.

We were fortunate to learn that this was wrong before we had children. The person we thank most for showing us the facts is Barbara Findeisen, the president of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health. In the last fifty years, psychological research has uncovered overwhelming evidence of this view. Findeisen herself has spent more than thirty years in the field, and through the Star Foundation, she's helped thousands of people to understand how their own births affected their physical and mental well-being. It is a repeatable phenomenon measurable by science.

A New Way of Thinking

The line of thinking we've described sounds a bit New Age, but we're certain it made a difference in the emotional health of our children, and we know that emotional health leads to better gene expression. The hardest part of keeping your unborn baby in growth mode is managing your emotions to minimize stress. A loving and peaceful womb environment triggers growth programs in a baby. Try as she may, an anxious or a depressed mother who faces an uncomfortable situation at home or financial uncertainty in her life will have a difficult time keeping her feelings away from her baby.

In our book, we describe the best methods we know for reducing stress, including breathing techniques, exercise, heart rate variability training, meditation, and yoga. Practicing a stress-reducing technique you're comfortable with will help to fill you with peace and love before and during pregnancy. We let you know the science behind each technique.

Comparing Your Baby to Others

If all of what we've written so far seems overwhelming, or if you're already pregnant and wondering how much it matters that you didn't detox before you got pregnant, we have a word of advice for you: relax. Every day, thousands of babies are born healthy in spite of their mothers eating suboptimal diets, being exposed to toxins, or being stressed out.

In this book we present every technique we found and used to make the best pregnancy possible. We didn't use some of the techniques when we had our first child, Anna. We did further research and used some of them only with our second child, Alan. Choose the techniques that feel right for you and your baby, and implement them as you see fit. And remember, even if you don't do them perfectly or you “cheat” occasionally, the odds are high that your baby will be happy and healthy if you follow the core principles.

Remember too that there is no way to compare your baby to other babies. No one can determine which parents did a better job of optimizing, because the interplay of genetics, environmental factors, and uncontrollable circumstances is too complex to analyze now. Even if you do not compare your baby to others, there is no way to be sure that your pregnancy optimization planning had any effect at all. Maybe it's just good genetics, blind luck, providence, karma, or fate. It's your call.

Even though we couldn't measure our results precisely, we decided to do our best without taking unnecessary risks, and we couldn't be happier with the results. We're convinced that our program was helpful to our entire family in tangible ways. There's no way to prove that our children are any different now than they would have been if Lana had eaten toxic processed food every day of her pregnancy. Even though we can't prove it, though, we know—the way only a mommy and a daddy can know—that our children are better off because of our efforts. We sincerely hope our book helps you to improve your baby's health, intelligence, and well-being.

Before We Continue

In the next chapter we start to describe the Better Baby Plan in detail. Before we do that, we'd like to acknowledge that there's a lot of conflicting information out there. Sometimes scientific studies aren't carried out in the most honest or effective way or are funded by special interests. Statistics are sometimes skewed and misrepresented. One study's conclusions conflict with another study's conclusions, and researchers highlight the flaws in the methodology used by other researchers. Some of the most helpful new groundbreaking research gets suppressed because it disagrees with a whole generation of scientists who didn't use newer tools when they formed their conclusions years ago.

Sometimes we present information and sources that conflict with conventional health advice. We cite many scientific studies, as well as books, articles, and websites that helped us to reach our conclusions about how to have the healthiest children we could.

We don't consider our recommendations to be comprehensive, and we don't think you should, either. New things are discovered every day. What we do know is that the information we gleaned from our sources added up to a brilliantly successful program for us. Although some might argue with the information we present, we think the success of our program is a powerful testimony to the credibility of our recommendations. We tell you exactly what we did and explain our reasons for doing it. Our program worked wonderfully for us, and we think it can work wonderfully for you, too.

When we created our plan, our goal was to take our knowledge of epigenetics and its implications for pregnancy and fetal development and use it to do the best we could. We did it for our children—and for their children and beyond. Knowing about epigenetics before we had kids taught us that many generations can be affected by what we think and do. There's good evidence that healthier, more intelligent people enjoy greater success throughout life, and we know from epigenetics that a good start lasts more than a lifetime.

PART TWO

The Better Baby Diet

3

Better Baby Building Blocks

Most parents know intuitively that the most important building block for a baby is a parent's unconditional love. As scientists, we believe that the most important thing you can do as a parent is to consciously show your baby—from the moment you learn you're pregnant—that he or she is wanted and loved. Parents are biologically wired to feel this way already, and since you're reading this book, the odds are high that your baby is already benefiting from your love and desire to do everything you can for him or her.

You'll find more about the connection between emotions and Better Babies later on. For now, let's look at the physical building blocks of a baby's body and brain, which are a mix of water, healthy fats, proteins, minerals, and a few carbohydrates.

What Bodies Are Made Of

It's possible for our bodies to convert an amazing variety of foods into these basic building blocks. However, the fields of biochemistry, medical science, and nutrition show that it's much easier for our bodies to convert some foods into building blocks than others. If we provide ourselves with foods that take a lot of metabolic energy to transform them into healthy building blocks, we end up wasting that energy instead of using it to make a healthier baby.

In our quest to provide our babies with the best possible conditions for growth, we consciously chose to eat the foods that were easiest for a mother's body to convert into building blocks. This principle, along with years of medical training and research into nutrition, shapes the Better Baby nutrition plan.

In this section, we describe the basic building blocks of the human body. Although the precise ratios of the types of building blocks vary based on sex, race, age, and even individual makeup, the building blocks themselves are the same. In the next section, we'll cover the building blocks of the brain in particular, because building a healthy brain is one of the most important tasks.

What brains are made of

Water

Believe it or not, water is the most common building block. The adult body is typically between 50 and 60 percent water, but newborns are 78 percent water. Most of the time, we don't pay much attention to water. But when we don't get enough and we become dehydrated, our bodies don't work well at all, especially our reproductive organs. The body can live much longer without food than it can without water, but your goal as a parent is to make sure you don't run low on either one.

Staying hydrated with purified water is essential during pregnancy, especially during the formation of amniotic fluid. Properly hydrated tissues help a mother's body to flush away toxins, so water is not only a building block for your baby, it's a way of protecting him or her from toxins. Pure water is also vital to fertility because it keeps the womb hydrated and the menstrual cycle running smoothly.

At twenty-eight weeks, a fetus is made of 84 percent water. Babies don't have fruit juice, sports drinks, or soda circulating in their bodies. These drinks aren't building blocks! Our goal is to provide the body with the things that are easiest to convert into healthy babies, and with clean water, no conversion at all is necessary. In the case of those other drinks, the body has to do a lot of work to get pure water out of them, and sometimes they even promote dehydration.

Mild chronic dehydration is surprisingly common, because people make the mistake of choosing sweetened drinks over water. In our experience, most women who switch to water and herbal teas don't have difficulty with mild dehydration anymore, and they naturally drink the amount they need. Guidelines based on number of glasses of water per day are woefully inadequate, because the body's need for water varies, especially during pregnancy.

Frequently, tap water and even many bottled waters contain harmful contaminants. Even though contaminated water meets the body's basic need for water, well-filtered water or clean mineral water meets the need with no downside. If 84 percent of your baby is water, and 51 percent of the mother is water, you want it to be clean water. We'll tell you exactly how to get clean water in chapter 10.

Fats

Women naturally carry more fat than men—about 50 percent more as a percentage of body weight. Women carry this fat (about 29 percent of body weight) because it's necessary for fertility, temperature regulation, and shock absorption. Fat is also a building block of healthy cell walls and hormones. Some fats are also healthy fuel for the body.

Fats have gained a bad reputation from the media, but many fats are healthy and essential for life. There certainly are unhealthy fats that can cause health problems. But many mothers make the mistake of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” when they assume that eating less fat will make them or their babies healthier.

In fact, if you take away the water, a woman's body is made up of about 60 percent fat—more than twice as much fat as protein. Healthy fats are a major component of the human body, and it's very important for a pregnant woman to eat them daily. Her baby needs them badly—especially for brain growth. In fact, between twenty-eight weeks and birth, a female fetus increases the amount of fat in her body by twelve and a half times, a far bigger increase than for protein. Much of this increase comes from the fats that make up the brain itself, and the quality of the initial fat building blocks can affect brain function forever.

Our livers use healthy fats to make cholesterol when we need it. Our bodies then use the cholesterol as a building block for cell walls and hormones and even to bind to and excrete some toxins that are harmful to a growing baby. Cholesterol is a fundamental brain component—we can't live without it.

Omega fats, especially omega-3, are nutritionally essential because the body needs them to function yet cannot make them. They have to be in our diet in the proper ratios and amounts. Some of these omega fats are used in the brain to support and protect the neurons, but others in excess can lead to inflammation and health problems. Babies need the right amounts of omega fats to support brain growth.

Since our bodies are made of fats, a low-fat diet is almost always a bad idea, especially during pregnancy, when your body is trying to build another little body. We assure you that eating the right fats—the kinds bodies are made of—doesn't promote weight gain at all and won't pose a health risk. Since eating healthy fats helps the body to build the right hormones, weight
loss
is a common result. Better hormone function is also why healthy fats increase fertility.

Saturated fats are some of the best building-block fats. A whopping 90 percent of the fats in a newborn baby are saturated or monounsaturated. Healthy saturated fats are critical for a baby's brain growth. In fact, the placenta often chooses to allow saturated fats to reach the baby while blocking other fats. In chapter 4, we explain which fats your baby needs most and which foods contain them.

Proteins

Proteins are the primary structural building blocks of our bodies. They come in all shapes and sizes. The body uses proteins to make most body tissues, including bones, tendons, cartilage, muscles, internal organs, skin, and hair. The average adult is 20 percent protein, but the average woman is 15 percent protein. Like fats, proteins are not all created equal. Some proteins are easy to digest, whereas others are difficult for the body to handle. An example of easily digested protein is beef or lamb from healthy animals. Difficult proteins include gluten from wheat, casein from cow's milk, and soy.

It makes sense that meat from animals is the natural protein source closest to our own makeup. Our bodies can use other protein types, but it takes a lot more enzymes and biological energy to digest them. With meat, most of the work has already been done for us, and meat usually comes with easily used fat that is similar to our own. This is why we recommend eating meat from healthy animals during pregnancy.

Eating red meat probably goes against the health advice you've read. This advice is based on meat from animals that were raised incorrectly and fed the wrong feed. Studies of the health benefits of meat from cattle and lambs that ate the right feed (that is, grass) show that healthy red meat is one of the best choices for a pregnant woman. We'll explain this fully in chapter 5.

Between twenty-eight weeks and birth, a male fetus increases the amount of protein in his body by five times. Your baby will need the right amount—and type—of protein to grow into the healthiest baby he or she can be. A diet deficient in easily digestible protein may result in lower birth weight, lower cognitive function in the baby, or other complications.

It's our experience that most pregnant women don't eat enough protein, and much of the protein they do eat has been made very difficult for the body to use because it's gone through a chemical process called
denaturation
. Denaturation is what happens when proteins are exposed to high heat or pressure that permanently alters their structure. Denatured protein is at best hard for the body to use, and at worst it can be harmful to mother and baby. We identify which foods contain healthy protein and which foods contain harmful protein in chapters 4 and 5. We also explain how the way you cook protein makes a huge difference in how healthy it is.

Minerals

A fertile woman's body is about 4 percent minerals, with skeletal calcium, phosphorus, and potassium composing most of it, followed by magnesium, chlorine, iodine, iron, sodium, and sulfur. The body also contains trace amounts of chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, vanadium, zinc, and others. These minerals perform many functions in the body and are building blocks of important enzymes and hormones.

They're required for life, and they must be kept in careful balance. Iodine composes a minuscule percentage of the body, but without it, thyroid function declines, and brain function follows. Another example of maintaining balance is the ratio of calcium to magnesium. We've all been led to believe that calcium stops osteoporosis, but the truth is that calcium by itself, without magnesium, can cause problems, including osteoporosis. Few people know that prenatal vitamins are woefully inadequate in establishing and maintaining the mineral levels that mother and baby really need. We show you how to get the minerals you need in chapter 7.

Salt

Even though only 0.15 percent of the body is salt (sodium chloride), we cannot live without it. Our bodies have incredibly sensitive mechanisms in place to regulate our salt levels, because the ratio of sodium to potassium has to be perfect at all times or, simply put, life isn't possible. Our bodies can go to great lengths to keep sodium and potassium balanced, but there's a lot we can do to make the job easier.

It's commonly believed that eating salt leads to high blood pressure, but the science shows that only a small percentage of people with high blood pressure react strongly to salt. Michael Alderman, a past president of the American Society of Hypertension, conducted a well-controlled, four-year study of three thousand people and found that study participants who ate the least salt had the most heart attacks and cardiac complications. He concluded, “The more salt you eat, the less likely you are to die,” because low-salt study subjects were less healthy and died more often than high-salt subjects. Low-sodium diets raise LDL (bad) cholesterol, reduce sex drive, and raise insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes), all of which tilt the balance away from having the healthiest baby you can.

For healthy people, salt alone does not cause high blood pressure. High blood pressure is just as easily caused by too little calcium, magnesium, or potassium as by excess sodium. This is why reducing salt intake hasn't helped with high blood pressure, as people thought it would. It's much easier—and healthier—to deal with hypertension by increasing magnesium and potassium intake instead of reducing salt intake.

Also, sodium and salt are not the same thing. What we usually call table salt is now a mix of chemically extracted pure sodium and toxic aluminum anticaking agents. Too much sodium makes you thirsty because your body needs water to deal with the excess. Other common symptoms of excess pure sodium are cellulite, rheumatism, arthritis, gout, kidney stones, and gallstones.

High-quality sea salts, on the other hand, naturally contain a blend of minerals that provide the sodium the body needs while maintaining mineral balance. Some table salts are iodized, but iodizing doesn't even come close to getting the mineral balance right. The best salt we've found is pink salt mined in Utah or the Himalayas. These salts come from ancient seabeds that do not contain modern pollutants, but any sea salt contains a healthier mix of minerals than table salt. Prepared foods usually contain refined salt that is pure sodium, but as long as you maintain adequate magnesium and potassium intake, blood pressure is unlikely to be a problem for you, although the chemicals added to refined salt are toxic in themselves.