How to Make a Healthy Baby
I thought the hard part would be finding the right man. And it was hard.
It took me many years to find the man I wanted to spend my life with and start a family with. It was a struggle and I almost gave up. But then we found each other and fell in love and got married. I was 36 and he was 38 and we knew we wanted to start our family right away. We thought that the hard part was finding each other but we were wrong. The hard part was the next 4 years spent trying to get pregnant. The hard part was trying and failing to become a family. The hard part was four rounds of IVF. The hard part was managing finances and insurance policies. The hard part was crazy hormones and a thousand doctor’s appointments. The hard part was miscarriages and high risk pregnancies and a pre-natal diagnosis. The hard part was infertility. It took us four long years to finally get pregnant, and just like in my search for my husband, I almost gave up. It was hard. It was expensive. It took a huge psychological toll. But it also taught me so much and it ended up being worth every tear shed and more to have our two beautiful healthy daughters.
My fertility journey was ultimately my health journey.
My quest to be able to get and stay pregnant opened the door to so much information and changed how I viewed food and nutrition dramatically. Then, when our oldest daughter was born, my journey continued and I learned about toxins in our environment and how to support the body’s ability to detoxify itself. I’ve been learning ever since!
I was surprised to learn all the things that kept me from getting pregnant, I was a former birth control user but that was decades ago, but for me the problem ended up being namely GMOs. It started with an allergy test that showed I was allergic to corn. Not really big problem I thought, I’ll be sad to say good-bye to tortilla chips, but I’ll live. And then I started my research and I learned that the list of things made out of corn in this country is four pages long single spaced. Seriously. And the vast majority of them don’t have the word “corn” in them at all. Corn is not only a food, it is a food additive, preservative, disinfectant, lubricant, emulsifier, anti-caking agent, and more. It was really an eye-opener for me because when I saw this list, I wondered WHY? Why are all these things were made from corn in the U.S. Yes, I already knew that corn was a subsidized crop, but even with that this list seemed incredible. Then I learn about GMOs - genetically modified organisms. There are 10 crops in the country that are already have been (for many decades in most cases) modified and in our food supply with no warning and very little testing. Corn is a main one.
There are 142 different events (types) of genetically modified corn, the most of any plant species.
Almost 90% of the GMO corn grown in the United States goes into animal feed and biofuels, while the remainder is processed down into various ingredients such as high-fructose corn syrup and corn starch, or used as the source material to make ingredients such as alcohol and citric acid. In the United States, livestock have been consuming feed made from genetically modified crops for almost twenty years.
A study by Ibrahim and Okasha entitled “Effect of genetically modified corn on the jejunal mucosa of adult male albino rat.,” and published in the journal Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology has demonstrated that rats fed GM Bt corn MON810 for only 90 days did indeed suffer rather serious damage to the surface mucous membranes of the jejunum – which is part of the small intestine. For years now researchers in Russia and Egypt have published studies showing that animals fed diets of GMO corn and soy were showing notable signs of infertility after 3 generations. Notable signs of infertility meant sterility - the inability to conceive - after 3 generations! It’s clear that GMOs mess up your gut and your ability to procreate among many other things, but for this story those are the big ones to pay attention to.
So I stopped eating corn, and I stopped eating all GMOs which meant I was eating an organic diet - which sounds great right?
But then I learned that organic processed food is still bad for you! Yes, it’s light years better than non-organic processed foods, but still it’s going to have preservatives, stabilizers, pasteurization and all sorts of other things meant to help it live on that store shelf for much longer than is natural. I learned about manufacturing processes and sourcing. And thus began my journey into real food.
And then I learned about Dr. Weston A. Price and his research. He studied healthy traditional populations around the world to understand why they were so healhty and how they achieved superior immunity, fertility and longevity. Through his research and others like him I began to understand that how you prepare your food matters just as much as what food you prepare. I began to understand the importance of nourishing my body in preparation to host a new life. To build up reserves for the baby to draw from as it was knitting itself together from the ingredients I provided. Even peoples with pristine diets year round believed that a woman needed to consume a special diet for about 6 months prior to conception in order to ensure a perfect child and easy birth. I learned from these people, I modified my diet and my environment and we were able to get and stay pregnant for the first time.
These super informative posts by Jenny of Nourished Kitchen, which outline the essential foods for optimizing fertility, having a healthy pregnancy, growing a healthy baby, really helped by too: Fertility Foods and Unexplained Infertility.
Here’s some additional resources that informed me along this journey:
