We’re excited! Vogue Magazine just featured us in an article about epigenetics and how your environment during pregnancy shapes your children. Look for us in the June 2012 print issue.
It’s awesome to see a fashion magazine writing anything about pregnancy, especially when standards for models are so thin that it’s hard to maintain fertility at those levels, much less have vibrantly healthy babies. Here is our take on the Vogue article, including a little bit of background on our upcoming book (Dec 2012, Wiley & Sons).
We spent thousands of hours researching, writing and implementing of the most cutting edge information about what creates the optimal environment for a baby developing in his mother’s womb. It was such a labor of love that our midwife, Stanford trained OBGYN and Stanford attending pediatrician said: “Write a book about it!!!” So even though it may seem a little crazy to write a book with a new baby plus demanding day jobs, we did just that.
We wrote the Better Baby Book, with 1300 scientific reference on everything from epigenetics to nutrition to stress management. It’s a complete program to guide women how to have an optimal pregnancy and a healthier, smarter and more resilient child. We poured our hearts into it, because we truly believe that this is knowledge that will make a difference to babies and their parents. As parents ourselves, we felt it was important to share this knowledge.
So when Vogue called to interview us as part of their piece on epigenetics and how to best increase your baby’s lifelong health and quality of life starting in the womb, we were delighted. Mothers, and mothers to be, would be reading this, and their children would benefit! Big smile on our faces.
Well . . . after having read the article in Vogue, our first reaction was: “???”
Was the article really about epigenetics, being pro-active and helping your child from day one? How is it possible that after all the information we gave the writer, and all the information that’s out there, the final conclusion could be “women would do well just to follow more closely the tried-and-true nutritional advice from their obstetricians: eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, take a prenatal vitamin, don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol and avoid processed foods.”
Don’t smoke, don’t drink and don’t eat processed foods . . . amen to that. But everyone knows that. Same goes for the prenatal vitamins, which by the way are much harder to get right than people might like to think. So where is the cutting edge research that will boost your child’s developing brain, immune system and help reduce allergies as well as risks of disease later in life? Where is the information that I can use, NOW, in my everyday life, to have a better pregnancy and a more resilient child? Surely it’s out there?
It is, but you won’t find it in an article that concludes with “we know so little about the absolute healthiest diet . . ..” Excuse me? We know so little? Absolutely not. We know LOTS about the healthiest diets and steps to take for a mother and her developing baby. Don’t take my word for it, check any of the 1300 scientific references we used as sources for our book. We’ll be including every reference here on our web site because there are so many they don’t fit in the print edition of the book.
There is fantastic information out there on how to nourish yourself and your baby. And it’s not a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Yes, it’s like swearing in church, but fruits especially have very little nutritional value and contain high amounts of sugar. In order to get the optimal doses of vitamins from your fruits, you would have to eat truly insane amounts which would not only upset your GI tract and likely cause candida overgrowth, but more importantly take you on such a roller coaster sugar ride that your pancreas would be reeling from all the insulin it had to release to keep your blood sugar even halfway normal. Fruit is not food. Fruit is desert!
Vegetables are better, especially green non-starchy ones. But large amounts of those are not going to build you a healthy brainy child either. Think about it: the human body is NOT built from sugars and fibers. It’s built from FAT and PROTEIN. That is what you need to give yourself and your baby while pregnant. Lots of fat and lots of protein. Oh dear, that’s like swearing in church, again! But It’s really simple: we are not cows or rabbits. The human body does NOT know how to convert fruit and veggies into lots of healthy amino acids and fats. If we did, we could all eat grass and leaves and make everything we need from them. But we don’t even know how to make our own vitamin C, unlike most other animals.
So we need to get the right building blocks through our diet. And since all fats and protein are not created equal, you have to be really choosy about which ones you consume. One of the best and cheapest sources of fat, for anyone, regardless their pay check, is grass fed butter. Yes, BUTTER! Grass fed butter will not harm your cholesterol, nor your triglycerides, and ladies, it will not make you fat. In fact it can help you lose weight, as you don’t eat lots of carbs.
The Vogue article cites “Lana also cut out all refined sugar and starch (thought to affect insulin levels, raising risk of heart disease and diabetes).” You bet I did. There is no “thought” about it. Refined sugar and starchy foods DO affect insulin levels, and absolutely increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes. There have been lots of studies to prove exactly that. Big studies, famous studies, published in respected journals such as JAMA and Lancet.
We’re really not sure why Vogue didn’t mention our book or blog in the article; that’s kind of sad. We want healthier babies everywhere!
About The Author: Lana
Lana Asprey is the mother of 2, received her MD from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and co-author of the Better Baby Book. She has practiced family medicine and internal medicine, and worked extensively with hard-to-spot allergies to metals and environmental toxins. Lana has a deep understanding of the link that exists between environment, diet, and health. Lana also holds an MS from the Stockholm School of Economics.
