Sensuous Food for the Mother-to-be

By Cynthia Lair, Author and Creator of Cookus Interruptus
Issue 138 - September/October 2006

I teach at the School of Nutrition and Exercise Science of Bastyr University. Several months ago, during an all-faculty meeting about learning objectives for the university as a whole, as well as for each department, the facilitator asked us to think about what we wanted our students to be able to do after they graduate from Bastyr. I immediately had an answer: "Eat without fear."

Our Western medical model is based on a mechanistic view of nutrition. We dissect foods in an attempt to quantify their contents. Charts are drawn up to show us how an average egg contains a certain number of calories, so many milligrams of this, international units of that, and grams of such and such. Then we decide how many units of each of these macro- and micronutrients will be used up by an "average" pregnant woman weighing x pounds and walking x kilometers per week. After the data are gathered, someone crunches the numbers and makes recommendations of how many units of each nutrient needs to be poured into this average pregnant woman to make sure the machine works.

Don't get caught up in the fear, the math of popular nutrition. Let your intuition and senses emerge to discover the best food for feeding our future.

Building a Baby
It's true that reading labels should be encouraged so that pregnant and lactating women don't put unusable or harmful substances into their bodies. It's also true that there is substantial evidence showing that pregnant and lactating women need more of all of the known nutrients—protein, fat, carbohydrates, calcium, vitamins A and C—as well as overall calories. Name it, and the pregnant or lactating woman needs more of it.

But so far, only a tiny percentage of all the miraculous nutrients that compose natural foods have been identified. In the early 19th century, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats were thought to be the compounds that comprised all foods. The second wave of discoveries about nutrition came with the identification of vitamins and minerals. We found that for the macronutrients to metabolize in the body, the presence of certain vitamins and minerals was also required. Recently, polyphenols, another set of nutrients in food plants, were discovered. There are hundreds of these naturally occurring chemical compounds, and they give plants what they need to manufacture not just various antioxidants and colors, but flavor.

Consider, too, that feeding a mother and child is more than a math quiz. Vitamins and minerals and grams of whatever are all good to know about, but we take their presence on faith—these substances are invisible to us. When you eat kale, your taste buds can't tell how many milligrams of calcium and vitamins A and C are present.

Sense your diet
The pregnant and lactating female represents the human form in its most creative state. By emphasizing the color, flavor, vitality, and simple beauty of food, we honor the artistry of pregnancy and lactation. By encouraging sight, smell, taste, and touch, we tap into the highly sensitive state of pregnant and nursing mothers. Food that is locally in season is not only at the peak of flavor but also at the peak of nutritional content. Foods that have fully developed polyphenols offer higher vitamin and mineral contents, but it is also likely that such foods will have more flavor. When food is cooked to perfection, without too much or too little heat, the flavor is at its peak. And when a food's flavor is at its peak, so is its nutrient bioavailability. The bright, perky leaves of freshly picked kale, the deep orange of butternut squash, the naturally tight, red flesh of a wild Alaskan salmon, the buttery flavor of a fresh pecan right out of the shell, the amazing geometric patterns of young cabbage, the unbelievably gold color and sweet taste of the yolk of an egg laid by a pastured hen—one that got to peck in the soil for worms and bugs, which creates higher omega-3 fats in the yolk—these are the clues to the potent, nutrient-dense food that pregnant and lactating mothers need.

So instead of computing what breakfast to feed our posterity, how about sensing it? The body has a highly developed intuitive sense of what it needs. If we limit our choices to foods that nature presents—foods that are fresh, local, organic, and in season; foods rich in color, flavor, and good looks—the pocket calculator can be left for balancing the checkbook.

1. What am I hungry for?
Let's say it's something that's not all that rich in nutrients, such as a fast-food hamburger or a Twinkie. Make a leap toward quality to transpose your desire. Would a grilled steak from a healthy grass-fed cow, alongside salad and warm, whole-grain sourdough bread, do the trick? Do summer berries topped with fresh-whipped organic cream and a homemade oatmeal cookie sound right?