Optimal Nutrition for Fertility, Pregnancy, and Breastfeeding

A summary of the research on what nutrients build healthy babies that are resistant to disease, have strong bones, and fully developed brains. I had many requests to write this post.

Weston Price noticed that every isolated people group he visited with extraordinary health used specific diets for women before, during, and after pregnancy that included nutrient-dense animal foods high in fat and vitamins.

Modern science has confirmed what’s behind this nutritional wisdom from these indigenous cultures. These fertility foods provide the exact nutrients necessary for optimal human development. Although it’s possible to eek out an existence on just about any kind of food, this post is concerned with producing babies who have the greatest resistance to infectious, chronic, and autoimmune disease, healthy bone structure, and proper brain development, all characteristics Price universally noted in his travels.

Don’t think for a second that because you live in a first-world country, you surely get enough nutrients. The first world countries have the most nutrient-deprived foods grown in the most nutrient-deprived soils anywhere. Copious amounts of empty calories do not make healthy babies.

I chose for this post to focus on the most important nutrients, some which are often overlooked in discussions of fertility nutrition. For example, few people are talking about choline and glycine, two of the most essential nutrients.

As always, allow me to remind everyone that I do not have a license from the medical mafia to practice medicine, nor am I a certified nutritionist, which means that this post is purely for informational purposes. As always, consult your local doctor (who likely received zero hours of nutritional training in medical school) for the official Science^TM.

Summary of today’s post: Pregnant and breastfeeding women and those preparing for childbirth need extra animal protein, glycine which builds collagen in the new baby, animal fat and cholesterol for the baby’s brain development, choline (a nutrient from the B-vitamin family), extra biotin (B-7), folate (B9) but not lab-made folic acid, large amounts of vitamin A, iodine from seafood, iron from red meat, vitamin D from animal foods and sunshine, and DHA.

Also covered: a sample menu for how to incorporate all the nutrients, why pregnant and breastfeeding women shouldn’t fast, how to keep from gaining too much weight, strategies for pregnancy nausea, and why it’s not safe to rely on prenatal vitamins alone for nutrition.

Summary of foods to eat daily during the child-bearing years:

• Cod liver oil: 2 teaspoons high vitamin cod liver oil with butter oil (Green Pasture brand) or 3 capsules.

• 1 quart (or 32 ounces) whole milk daily, preferably raw and from pasture-fed cows (find raw milk at realmilk.com)

• 4 tablespoons butter, preferably from pasture-fed cows

• 4 or more egg yolks, preferably from pastured chickens

• 2-3 ounces fresh liver daily (If you have been told to avoid liver for fear of getting “too much Vitamin A,” be sure to read Vitamin A Saga)

• Fresh seafood, 2-4 times per week, particularly wild salmon, shellfish and fish eggs

• Fresh beef or lamb daily, always consumed with the fat

• Oily fish or lard daily, for vitamin D

• Lacto-fermented condiments and beverages

• Bone broths used in soups, stews and sauces

• Soaked whole grains

• Fresh vegetables and fruits

Macronutrients

Food is categorized into three macronutrients (or macros) which are carbohydrates (bread, pasta, cereal, potato, rice, etc), protein (eggs, meat), and fats (oils, butter, heavy cream, animal fat, avocado, coconut oil, etc). Many foods contain a combination of the three macros. For instance, milk contains almost equal amounts of carbs, fat, and protein.

Pregnancy and breastfeeding greatly increase a woman’s need for both protein and fat.

Protein: protein sources should come primarily from animal sources and dairy since animal protein contains the correct ratios of amino acids that our body will use to assemble a new person. Plant foods such as beans have small amounts of protein that is poorly digested and assimilated by the body. Beans are not a complete protein since they do not contain all 20 amino acids necessary to assemble protein—beans are missing methionine. However, when you pair beans with rice, you get a complete protein since rice contains methioine. This will give you a little protein but it is very difficult to eat enough plant protein to sustain the amount required for optimal health for a woman who is pregnant and breastfeeding and optimal development for the baby.

Collagen is a specific kind of protein that makes up our skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, and hair. In order for your body to build collagen, it needs large amounts of the amino acid glycine since every third amino acid in collagen is glycine. Therefore, when you are building a new human being, (or providing all the necessary nutrients for a rapidly growing human when breastfeeding), your glycine requirements go way up.

Here are some foods that supply glycine: bone broth, chicken skin, pork rinds (you can buy in the chips section of the store), canned sardines with the bones in them, dark meat chicken, cheaper cuts of beef such as chuck, sausage, and hot dogs (use high quality only without chemicals which can be hard to find).

You can also buy glycine powder and mix it into tea, coffee, yogurt, and sparkling water with lemon (glycine greatly improves with sleep too). Another option is to use a collagen powder with a meal. (If you take collagen by itself, your body will often turn it into glucose and use it for fuel unless it’s consumed with a high-protein meal. Your body needs a large amount of protein at once to signal it to synthesize muscle and not burn the protein for fuel.)

Animal Fats: animal fats are vitally important for pregnant and breastfeeding moms as the fat makes up the material of the growing baby’s brain. (Animal fats are also essential for the development of infants’ and toddlers’ brains as well).

The most nutritious fat comes from beef and lamb. Pork and chicken fat are slightly inferior since neither pigs nor chickens are ruminants causing them to eat less nutrient-dense foods than grass-fed ruminants. Another great source of animal fat is the cream, butter, and cheese of grass-fed cows, sheep, and goats. Buy the highest quality cheese and butter you can afford.

One of the most nutrient-dense fats you can consume is bone marrow. You can buy beef marrow bones from most grocery stores, roast them in the oven at 400 for an hour, and then eat the spreadable goodness from the middle of the bones.

Adequate amounts of cholesterol are also important during reproduction (and no, eating cholesterol doesn’t raise your risk of heart disease. That’s fake science made up by the processed food industry). Cholesterol is necessary for synthesizing hormones which increase during pregnancy, and it is necessary to create every single new human cell. Cholesterol is found in eggs, meat, and dairy.

Avoid all canola, soybean, cottonseed, vegetable oils, and any other seed oils. When you need an oil that is liquid at room temperature, opt for olive or avocado oil. Coconut is a good option for browning meat, although it’s not as nutrient-dense as beef tallow. (For more on why to avoid seed oils, see this post.)

Here’s a thorough discussion of the importance of fat from the definitive textbook Ketogenic: The Science of Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction in Human Health by Dr. Timothy Noakes, et al.

Over the past 70 years, due to societal lipophobia [fear of fat], inadequate substrate provision, particularly saturated fat, essential omega-3 long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) and micronutrients, primarily in the maternal diet during pregnancy and in formula-fed and weaned infants, have influenced the development of the foetus and newborn child, in particular the brain. These substrate deficiencies have led to a combination of structural inadequacy (particularly in the white matter of the brain) as well as a substitution of membrane components [331]. Membrane structure reflects a decrease in essential LC-PUFA, cholesterol, and ultra-long chain saturated FAs [fatty acids] with a significantly higher proportion of non-essential PUFAs, pro-inflammatory omega-6 PUFAs, 16 palmitic acid (a fatty acid derivative of glucose de novo lipogenesis in the liver and brain) and a deficiency in particular of ketone bodies and vitamin D (a steroid hormone) [332,333]. In addition, foetal and maternal insulin resistance and loss of hormonal and substrate cycling, due to increased frequency of snacking on refined carbohydrates devoid of fat, has flattened hormonal diurnal variation [334]. This leads to abnormal structural cellular development (particularly prominent in the high essential fatty acid-requiring white matter of the brain) [335
338], which in turn would be expected to result in a dramatic rise in ASD incidence concomitant with the adoption of a high carbohydrate, low fat, low cholesterol, and low salt diet.

The brain is one of the fastest growing organs in the foetal body with the head comprising one third of a newborn’s mass. Hyperplastic neuronal and support cell mitosis only occurs in the early foetal and childhood developing brain to any significant extent. As such, substrate demands are vastly greater during this period than at any other time of life. The growing brain has to incorporate whole structural FAs [fatty acids] into cell and organelle phospholipid membranes. However, the rate of transport of whole FAs across the placenta and blood-brain barrier is too slow, which means that the manufacture of FAs by dividing cells is a critical part of growth [339]. Ideally, substrate for such FA [fatty acid] creation comes from ketones [340], but in the modern era of chronic excessive carbohydrate consumption, insulin resistance, and reduction in saturated and essential FA consumption, glucose has become a primary substrate for lipogenesis. Glucose-based lipogenesis generates predominantly C-16 and C-18 palmitic and oleic acids (energy storage fats) rather than phospholipid structural fat [341]. These compete with and displace cholesterol, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and ecosapentanoic [EPA]”

Tl;dr: Pregnant women aren’t eating enough fats so babies brains are developing abnormally. Having some ketones present in a pregnant women allows her body to create some of the fat necessary for her baby’s development. Excessive carb intake creates energy-storage fats but not the structural kind of fat necessary for the baby’s brain. Aim to have some ketones present while pregnant and breastfeeding.

Micronutrients (aka vitamins and minerals)