9 months of pregnancy are now considered by a lot of researchers to be the most consequential period of our lives. Just think about that for a second. They’re saying that before we’re even born is the most important period of time in determining our health for the rest of our life. It’s kind of not fair really.
This period, the gestation period, they’ve found that it permanently influences the wiring of the brain and the functioning of the organs like the heart, the liver and the pancreas. It also suggests that the conditions encountered during pregnancy shape everything from our susceptibility to disease to our appetite and metabolism to our intelligence and temperament. There’s some amazing research that is shown, and I cover this in the presentation, that has shown that babies that are born at a low birth weight, which is primarily determined by maternal nutrition, have a significantly higher risk for diseases like heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease and things like that later in life independently of lifestyle risk factors
I mean there were 2.5 million years and 77,000 generations of humans eating a Paleo diet and somehow we managed to procreate and make it all the way up to the present day. The idea that it’s not safe to be on a Paleo diet while pregnant is just preposterous. I don’t know how anyone with any kind of grasp on evolutionary history can say that. Just on a really common sense level, it’s obvious that it’s safe.
More specifically, Paleo diet is one of the most nutrient dense approaches to eating that there is so if you’re doing a Paleo diet and you’re eating organ meats and muscle meats and glycine rich foods like skin, bone broths made from skin and bones, a variety of vegetables and fruits and starchy tubers and a moderate amount of nuts and seeds and then you add some really nutrient dense raw fermented dairy, high fat dairy products, you’re eating cold water fish for the long chain omega3 and you’re avoiding all food toxins like industrial seed oils and grains, especially gluten containing grains and excess fructose and soy, that’s it. You can’t really be doing any better than that.
Unfortunately, as I’m sure most people who are listening to this podcast know, the conventional medical paradigm is far behind and off the track when it comes to nutrition in general and nutrition for conception and pregnancy and breastfeeding.