The Better Baby Book (6 page)

Sugar Is a Poor Energy Source

Eating sugar creates a cycle of highs and lows in the blood sugar and insulin levels. Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas to regulate blood sugar. When you eat sugar, your blood sugar level rises, and your pancreas responds by secreting insulin. The pancreas usually overestimates how much insulin to release, especially when you eat lots of sugar at once. The insulin surge causes a fast drop in blood sugar, which renews the craving for sugar. This is one way that sugar is addictive. We experience these peaks and lows as uneven energy levels, one moment being wide awake and the next moment sleepy.

Eating little sugar and plenty of healthy fats and maintaining sufficient levels of minerals like chromium will keep your blood sugar and energy levels constant, without peaks and valleys. Our diet helps mother and baby to sidestep the disadvantages of sugar and carbs and to harness the long-lasting power of healthy fats, proteins, and minerals.

Sugar Hurts the Brain

The mother's sugar level has a big effect on how nerve cells are structured during early fetal development. High insulin levels from blood sugar spikes hurt the body's ability to form and nourish neurons. High insulin also inhibits synaptic transmission, in a sense muffling the communication between neurons. Too much sugar during pregnancy can spike your insulin levels and inhibit your baby's brain development.

Sugar and Carbohydrates Make Us Fat

In his book
Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health
, Gary Taubes argues against the idea that obesity is a matter of calories consumed and calories burned. Gary explains that excess sugar and carbohydrate intake is responsible for obesity because both of these substances boost insulin levels. High insulin levels are one reason people get fat, because insulin tells our bodies to store fat rather than burn it. When the insulin level is low, the body burns fat at a normal, consistent rate. Insulin regulates blood sugar by quickly transporting excess glucose into body cells, especially fat cells, which convert and store the energy from the glucose as fat.

From the perspective of epigenetics, sugar is almost certainly turning on bad genes that promote obesity in our kids. Mothers with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes are at a higher risk of having children who struggle with obesity. This is because the fetus is exposed to too much supplementary insulin. If a newborn is exposed to excess insulin, such as through mother's milk, this can also lead to childhood obesity.

Sugar Causes Infertility

Eating sugar makes it more difficult for a woman to conceive, because the ovaries are very sensitive to insulin, and because too much sugar turns off a gene that controls sex hormones. When the insulin level rises, insulin invades the hormone receptors on the ovaries that normally receive reproductive hormones. This disrupts the communication among the ovaries, the hypothalamus, and the pituitary glands, which can disrupt the female reproductive cycle. A high insulin level can also cause the ovaries to produce too many male sex hormones like testosterone, which disrupts the precise balance of the female reproductive system.

Sugar Promotes Oxidative Stress

High blood sugar or even a temporary spike in blood sugar causes oxidative stress in the body. Oxidative stress is a condition in which the body's ability to deal with toxins and repair the damage caused by them is compromised. This allows the toxins to cause more severe damage—perhaps permanent damage.

Fructose: The Worst Sugar of All

There's one kind of sugar that's more harmful than all the others: fructose. Fructose forms half of normal sucrose sugar molecules. Fructose is part of what makes sugar sweet, and it is the main sugar in fruit, which explains why we don't recommend eating a lot of fruit during pregnancy. The amount of fructose found in high-fructose corn syrup or agave syrup is much too high and has been associated with mineral depletion, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, miscarriage, and a decrease in sensitivity to insulin. Fructose also causes mineral imbalance and stimulates a process that accelerates aging. Fructose is low on the glycemic index (which measures the effects of foods on blood sugar and insulin), which is why products like agave syrup have been touted as health foods. Don't be fooled.

Small amounts of fructose (up to 25 grams per day) in the form of raw honey or fruit are safe and quite helpful for sleep when eaten in the evening.

Chemical Flavor Enhancers

There are many chemical flavor enhancers and sweeteners. The most common, however, are monosodium glutamate (MSG) and aspartame, and they pose the greatest risk.

MSG

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a chemical flavor enhancer that makes food seem like it tastes better than it really does. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain that is responsible for sending signals. In healthy brains, glutamate is sprayed into the synapses, the nerve fires, and then a reuptake process takes the glutamate back out of the synapse so the nerve stops firing.

Monosodium glutamate raises the glutamate level until the reuptake mechanism overloads. Upon overload, the glutamate sits in the synapse, which keeps the neuron firing over and over until it becomes exhausted or even dies. So MSG is a substance you'll want to keep away from your baby's brain. MSG is very common in Chinese and fast food, and it occurs naturally in soy sauce. For our guide to avoiding MSG, check out
www.betterbabybook.com/msg
.

Aspartame

Aspartame is an artificial chemical sweetener that is marketed as NutraSweet and Equal. It's sold under other names as well and is often used to sweeten diet soda. Aspartame is 40 percent aspartic acid (aspartate), an excitatory neurotransmitter that functions similarly to glutamate. Like glutamate, aspartate causes excess neuron firing and the eventual exhaustion and death of the neuron. Another 50 percent of aspartame is phenylalanine, which can build up in the body over time. Excess phenylalanine can enter the brain and lower the serotonin level, eventually resulting in emotional disorders or depression. The last 10 percent of aspartame is methanol, an alcohol that breaks down into two deadly poisons inside the body: formaldehyde and formic acid. Eighty-nine independent safety studies have found aspartame to be a health risk.

Aspartame is used heavily in processed food products, especially those labeled “diet,” “sugar-free,” and “no sugar added.” It's also added to low-quality vitamin supplements and a host of medications. If a product contains aspartame, it will usually be on the ingredients list.

Other Chemical Flavor Enhancers

Other chemical sweeteners that have proven toxic effects inside the body are acesulfame K, saccharin, and sucralose (Splenda). They're found in many products similar to those that contain aspartame.

Most Grains

With the exception of rice, all grains including wheat, barley, oats, millet, rye, spelt, and quinoa contain antinutrients like phytic acid, and most of them contain glutenlike proteins that are bad news for a growing baby. Mycotoxins are also a real issue for many varieties of grain. Even just a little can have long-term effects on the health of your GI tract. For this reason, we recommend staying away from grains. Here are two of the most important ones to avoid.

Wheat

There are three reasons we avoided wheat during pregnancy and continue to avoid it now:

The best thing you can do is to stop eating wheat (this includes bulghur and couscous), but if you still choose to, sprouted wheat is your best choice because lectins are destroyed when grains sprout. Wheat is so prevalent that it can be difficult to avoid. Nonetheless, removing it from our diet made us feel a lot better. We think it's a must.

If you do choose to eat unsprouted wheat, you can deal with the lectins by supplementing with N-acetyl-glucosamine and D-mannose (take them with the wheat). Lectins are more attracted to these sugar molecules than they are to others, so the sugars serve as effective decoys to bind any lectins in the gut and escort them out of the body.

Corn (Maize)

Corn is very susceptible to mycotoxins, and these days it's often genetically modified. Corn products are used in almost every processed food in supermarkets across the United States. The most common corn product you'll find is corn oil, one of the bad oils. This widespread use makes avoiding corn difficult.

Any animal that has eaten corn is just as unhealthy as the corn itself, and most farm animals are fed corn. This is one reason we recommend meat and butter from grass-fed cattle in the next chapter. Any product containing corn, any product refined from corn, and any product made from an animal that ate corn poses a high risk for exposing your baby to mycotoxins, the dangers of GMO foods, or excessive amounts of omega-6 fat and carbohydrates.

The only corn we eat is locally grown, organic, non-GMO corn on the cob in the summer. And even then, we eat it infrequently because it's so high in sugar.

Certain Legumes

Legumes, including soy, peanuts, and lentils, are not the health foods they've been made out to be. They are too high in sugar and carbohydrates and contain high amounts of antinutrients like phytic acid, and they tend to be very allergenic and difficult to digest. Traditional cultures used these foods only after a long period of soaking, sprouting, and fermentation. There is little benefit to adding these foods to your diet and some risk.

Soy

Even though a wide range of products made from soybeans have been marketed as a health food in recent years, research proves that (unfermented) soy is extremely unhealthy. Most soy products in the United States are not fermented. Unfermented soy is a problem for the following reasons:

As you can see, soy has pretty much everything going against it. Fortunately, it's easy to avoid processed soy in the United States because it must be listed as an ingredient on product labels.

Most soy in Asian cuisine is different because it's been fermented. Fermentation greatly decreases the antinutrient and phytic acid levels. Fermented soy products include tempeh, miso, and natto. Most of these products are still highly processed and artificial, though, and soy sauce naturally contains MSG. To avoid GMO soy, make sure that any fermented soy product you eat is organic, or better yet just don't eat it at all.

Even in areas of the world like Asia where fermented soy is common, people actually don't eat much of it. A 1998 study found that Japanese men eat only about eight grams of soy per day (a teaspoon or two). The average misguided American consumes far more than this when he drinks a glass of soy milk or eats a soy burger (and these soy products aren't even fermented).

Peanuts

Peanuts are infamous for mold contamination, and that's why we avoid them. This contamination carries over into peanut butter and all other peanut products. Mycotoxins are probably why peanuts top the list of allergens in the United States. People have such violent reactions to peanuts that peanuts have been banned in many school lunchrooms. Given the peanut's susceptibility to mold, we're not surprised that traditional Chinese medicine includes peanuts in the
fa wu
, or toxic food, category. Peanuts are also high in omega-6 and won't help you lower your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. Almond products are a great substitute for peanut products because they're delicious, they contain lower levels of omega-6, and they aren't as susceptible to molds.

Yeast

Saccharomyces cerevisiae
—both baker's yeast and brewer's yeast—prevents the liver from detoxing your body as well as it can. It also helps harmful
Candida
yeasts grow, and it's atherogenic, which means it promotes the buildup of unhealthy cholesterol in the wrong places. Some misinformed people purposefully supplement with
S. cerevisiae
. Just because you see something at a health-food store doesn't mean it's healthy!

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are more mysterious and less well understood than many other organisms found in nature. We avoided mushrooms during pregnancy because people really don't know much about what they do inside the body. Different mushrooms produce such drastically different effects; some, considered “medicinal” mushrooms, do an excellent job of boosting the immune system and show great health benefits. Medicinal mushrooms usually grow on trees and include maitake, reishi, and shiitake.