Today I thought I would write about some stuff that health journalists love to tell us, but I think is a bit misleading.
The first one is so-called "pregnancy nutrition". In popular books and articles you will see images of pregnant ladies swilling down smoothies and tucking into pots of natural yoghurt.
Good foods indeed! But why save them for pregnancy? If you are not eating an ideal diet, certainly you may risk having a difficult pregnancy, post-natal depression, or your baby being born with defects. But saying you need a special diet for pregnancy is like saying it's ok to treat your body badly whenever you're not pregnant.
The only reason that medical professionals highlight certain nutrients like iron, zinc and folic acid, needed for a baby's growth and development, is because deficiencies of these micro-nutrients have been identified as contributors to birth defects. Please be absolutely sure that if your diet is deficient in these, then it is deficient in all other micro-nutrients too. If a babyβs health will be affected, then so will your own.
Too many croissants, crispy snacks, ice-cream, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, desserts, chocolate, white bread, white rice, pasta, deep-fried items, sodas? Yes, that'll do it. You won't find a lot of pregnancy-friendly nutrients in that lot. And doctors, prescribing folic acid supplements hundreds of times stronger than pregnancy actually requires, are not likely to enlighten you either.
In the 1990's official advice from dieticians was: "Enjoy your food. Eat less fat. Infants, elderly and pregnant women may need supplements". Hopefully dieticians have improved since then, but with "Dietary Reference Values" (formerly known as Recommended Daily Amounts) representing the amounts found in a diet of mostly junk food, I am not hopeful.
My advice for pregnancy is to add up how frequently you consume the above-mentioned junk items, and do some serious rationing. Remember, you are what you have eaten.
Vegan nutrition
I'm all in favour of saving animals' lives, but some of the vegan supermarket products are frankly quite scary as regards nutritional value.
Sending a child to school with a dairy cheese sandwich means your child will get some protein, calcium, zinc and other minerals. As long as the butter is real and the cheese is not low-fat, there will also be some vitamins A and D.
Unfortunately most vegan "cheese" is made from coconut oil combined with some form of starch, such as tapioca starch. So a vegan child could end up with a lunch consisting of two layers of starch, with a layer of fat and starch in between. I'm not sure of the rules in different countries for the fortification of artificial butter with vitamin D; this is something you may want to check.
Vegan cheese doesn't have to be nutritionally poor. You can make a very nice soft cheese from almonds, and a delicious cheese sauce from cashew nuts and nutritional yeast. In many ways I would recommend these as superior to dairy cheese, though vegans do need to ensure they do not become deficient in vitamins B12 and D, which are lacking in plant foods and must be supplemented. Nutritional yeast flakes with added B12 are a very useful item for vegans, and add protein and savoury flavour to many recipes, including mashed potatoes, soup and sauces.
Some of the vegan meat substitutes also worry me. Some are pure gluten (also known as "seitan") and some are made from extremely concentrated and highly-processed forms of soy. I am very much in favour of tofu, which I eat regularly myself, but textured vegetable protein (TVP) and soy protein isolate (SPI) are such concentrated sources of the so-called plant oestrogens, that I would tend to believe reports that they interfere with thyroid gland function.
In moderate amounts, "plant oestrogens" are more likely to be beneficial, and to act as oestrogen modulators or balancers, with the ability to lower high oestrogen as well as to raise low oestrogen in females. Dr Jeffrey Bland is a good source of information on this topic.
Finally, let's talk about "detoxification"
The health articles in magazines love to give us an annual post-festive-season "detox diet" every January. Lovely! Let's get all the toxins out of our body with lemon juice, smoothies, and a few days of fruit, salads and coffee avoidance. We'll all feel so much more clear-headed and energetic after that headache (indicating we were so full of toxins) has gone.
Of course there's nothing wrong with doing this. I'm all for it. But the headache is not caused by eliminating toxins. If you get one, it will be from caffeine withdrawal. And smoothies, fruit and salads cannot remove toxins from your body. Only your liver and kidneys can do that. However by consuming more of these foods you are likely taking less toxins INTO your body!
Am I suggesting you stop your annual January detox? No, I'm suggesting you find ways to enjoy it so much that you incorporate some of these changes permanently into your diet. Don't make healthy food a penance, make it delicious. If you don't enjoy cold, raw vegetables, make them into a tasty soup instead. If it's a hassle to make smoothies, or expensive to buy them, buy bottled organic vegetable juice. You get all the nourishment, but others have done the work cheaply for you. A glass of beet juice a day will help improve your liver and kidneys' ability to clear toxins from your body all year round.
As for the meat avoidance aspect of detox diets, that's not a bad idea either, but if you love meat, you don't have to give it up, just ration it. Aiming for no more than 4 ounces (110 grams) a day will help keep your blood pH at a healthy level without stressing your kidneys and without too much disturbance to a healthy gut microbiota. Remember, you have more bacteria in your gut than there are cells in your body, so you really don't want those bacteria to be the unfriendly kind!
If you haven't yet studied with me, you may be interested in my Foundations of Modern Naturopathy video course. It covers much more information on the gut microbiota and its effects on health. You will also learn how to fix some very common health problems and ailments.
Wishing you good health!
Linda