The Case for Real Food
The nutrition space can be confusing. Even with my education and years of self-study around health and nutrition, 15 minutes on Instagram will have me judging every aspect of what I am putting on my plate. Do any of these sound familiar;
“Shoot, am I supposed to be eating broccoli sprouts every day?”
“I forgot to make a dark leafy green for a side, is my organic chicken with roasted sweet potatoes meal a total bust now?”
“Am I SUPPOSED to be eating Vitamin A rich foods while pregnant, or totally avoiding them?”
Is this soluble or insoluble fiber, and which one am I supposed to eat more of?”
It’s exhausting friends. Hopefully, I can instill some calmness in this wild world, and encourage you to focus on balance, eating a variety of everything you tolerate, and also prioritizing real food that will nourish you in the unique way you need nourishment.
There are different needs you have at each phase of pregnancy, whether you are trying to conceive, planning to conceive, are pregnant, or in the postpartum phase. By focusing on these 2 things, real and diverse, it will help keep you on track when your head gets to spinning.
I will share different nutrients, sources, when, and why you need them throughout future blogs. For now, let me share the main reasons real food is your friend.
Your body knows what to do with it.
Everything we do requires energy, minerals, and nutrients. When we eat real food, the cost of digesting that food into usable nutrients is cheap. It doesn’t require extra enzymes, it doesn’t require your liver to focus on processing chemicals that it doesn’t recognize, and it doesn’t disrupt the billions of bacteria living in your gut. It keeps everyone happy and on task. Eating heavily processed foods is expensive. By the time your body has processed what you ate into energy and building blocks, it may have required and used up more resources than you provided it. The bad bacteria in your gut LOVE refined carbs and sugar. What you feed grows, what doesn’t get fed has to take a back seat. This gut imbalance is at the root of a LOT of symptoms, both in and outside the gut. Give your liver a break! Our liver has over 300 jobs to do to keep us healthy. With our modern lives, exposures to toxins, wi-fi, EMF’s, chemicals in our water, and just day to day to stress, we really put our liver through it. Plenty of the jobs our liver does daily are things that keep us alive. So, when it is overworked it will let things like detoxification slide. Things that may not be life or death, but that certainly contribute to imbalances that will affect our fertility, contribute to pregnancy complications, and things that will make postpartum a little more difficult.
Real food provides nutrients in forms we need.
In an attempt to avoid deficiency in pregnancy, recommendations were made for key nutrients to be consumed at certain amounts in order to ensure deficiencies didn’t result in complications for mom’s and babies. The problem is that instead of teaching women what foods would provide these nutrients, it was more lucrative to sell them the nutrients in the form of synthetic vitamins and fortified foods. We have learned over time that these may look similar to the real thing in a lab, but our body’s weren’t processing them equally. Vitamins like Vitamin A are best utilized in the retinol form, the form found in animal foods. But the vitamin A form being used was beta-carotene, the form found in plant foods like carrots. In order for our body to use this Vitamin A, it has to be converted into retinol. Only a percentage actually gets converted, and some people have a genetic variation that makes this conversion even more difficult. And remember, every process like this conversion, that happens in the body is not done for free. Nutrients are required to convert synthetic or unusable forms into forms our body can actually use. During preconception, pregnancy, and postpartum our needs for protein are higher than at other times. We run the risk of deficiency when we are prioritizing processed, carbohydrate heavy foods instead of animal-based protein. Real food provides the building blocks we need in the forms we need them. This isn’t a time to be running on empty. Nutrients matter during this time.
From trying to conceive all the way through postpartum recovery, nutrients are KEY! This is a demanding and taxing time, more than any other time in your life. Providing your body the fuel it needs today, sets you up for the next phase. How you feed yourself in the TTC phase, will impact how quickly you are able to get pregnant. How you feed yourself in the preconception phase (not just you but your PARTNER too), sets you up for how your first trimester goes. Each phase you are preparing for the next. And at each phase your body will require specific nutrients in specific amounts.
Action Step:
Your action step for this first post is to start prioritizing real food in all your meals. Find a great recipe site, like fedandfit.com or halfbakedharvest.com. If you are more of a cookbook person, order some that are using real food as their main ingredients.
Lastly, get on a great prenatal vitamin now. Even if you are in the TTC phase. My top recommendation for great prenatals are FullWell. It is just as important that your partner takes a prenatal vitamin too, and they have options for them as well. You can find links to order them online here.
