Healthy Eating - Holistic Pregnancy

*I Found this article on livestrong.com - It is so important that mothers have access to healthy foods during their pregnancy. Once again, as always, there are quite a few points that could be debatable but majority of the information is sensible and beneficial.

 

   Photo Credit Creatas Images/Creatas/Getty Images

 

Diet for a Holistic Pregnancy

Jun 26, 2011 | By Jan Sheehan

A holistic pregnancy is one that keeps things as natural as possible. Eating foods free of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and artificial ingredients is important to many women planning holistic pregnancies. A diet for a holistic pregnancy can help give your baby a healthy start as long it includes essential prenatal nutrients, according to Elisa Zied, R.D., a licensed dietitian specializing in prenatal and children's nutrition and author of "Feed Your Family Right."

Description

A diet for a holistic pregnancy usually emphasizes organic foods, which are grown, handled and processed without pesticides, genetic modification, hormones and antibiotics. Pesticides you consume during pregnancy are shared with your baby in utero and eventually come through in breast milk, according to the "What To Expect When You're Expecting" website. Organic fruits and vegetables are also likely to be fresher than non-organic produce, which may translate to better nutrition because many nutrients diminish as produce ages, Zied notes. Along with organic produce, a diet for a holistic pregnancy may include grass-fed beef, cage-free chicken and eggs, hormone-free milk and organic yogurt.

Description

A diet for a holistic pregnancy usually emphasizes organic foods, which are grown, handled and processed without pesticides, genetic modification, hormones and antibiotics. Pesticides you consume during pregnancy are shared with your baby in utero and eventually come through in breast milk, according to the "What To Expect When You're Expecting" website. Organic fruits and vegetables are also likely to be fresher than non-organic produce, which may translate to better nutrition because many nutrients diminish as produce ages, Zied notes. Along with organic produce, a diet for a holistic pregnancy may include grass-fed beef, cage-free chicken and eggs, hormone-free milk and organic yogurt.

Foods to Include

Organic spinach and asparagus are good sources of folate, a B vitamin needed during pregnancy to prevent neural tube defects. Most breakfast cereals are enriched with this important prenatal nutrient, but choose a natural, whole-grain brand without artificial ingredients. Most cereals are also fortified with iron. During pregnancy, a woman's iron needs double. You'll need plenty of calcium, found in organic milk and yogurt, as well as vitamin D to help build your baby's bones, according to MayoClinic.com. Salmon is an excellent source of vitamin D, but Zied recommends choosing wild fish rather farm-raised, which may contain chemical pollutants. Wild salmon is also loaded with protein and omega-3 fatty acids to fuel your baby's growth and aid brain development.

Foods to Avoid

Steer clear of packaged and processed food to get back to basics and provide natural nutrition for your developing baby. The American Pregnancy Association advises avoiding unwashed vegetables to prevent exposure to toxoplasmosis, a bacteria that could be harmful to an unborn baby. Don't eat sushi or large varieties of fish, including shark, king mackerel and swordfish. They could have high levels of mercury, a toxin that could damage your baby's brain and cause developmental delays. Soft cheeses, like Brie, and deli meat are also off limits because they could contain listeria, a bacteria that could trigger miscarriage. Caffeine has also been linked to miscarriages in some studies.

Tips

When you can't buy organic, be sure to wash produce meticulously. Also peel fruits and veggies before eating. Pesticides are typically on the peels, rather than inside, Zied notes. It's especially important to eat lots of protein during your last trimester when your baby is growing by leaps and bounds in anticipation of entering the world, according to Zied. Protein will also give you energy while your body is working overtime. It's best to get your protein and all your holistic nutrition in small bites. Zied advises eating five to six small meals throughout the day to keep your energy up and provide a steady stream of nutrients to your developing baby.

 

Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/479589-diet-for-a-holistic-pregnancy/#ixzz28me7g9hH

Placenta Encapsulation - A Dads Perspective

* Now I know this is not the most pro-placental encapsulation article (i am very pro) but I found this Dad's article and video so hilarious! Especially his over the top, sci-fi description of a placenta. In the scheme of things I find it quite amazing that a human being can create a whole new organ to support her unborn child!

Afterbirth: It's What's For Dinner

By Joel Stein

 

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off postpartum depression and increase milk supply, I said, "$275 is a bargain compared with the $20,000 I'll have to spend to tear out our kitchen immediately afterward."

Most mammals, Cassandra explained, eat their placentas, to which I countered that most dogs eat their poop. I stopped arguing there, figuring that like many of Cassandra's hippie ideas — the compost bin, rubbing lemon on her underarms instead of deodorant — she'd give up on this in a few weeks. Even as the due date approached and she was still set on eating her placenta, I couldn't imagine that she'd remember to request it from the doctor after the most physically draining experience of her life. This is a woman who, 9 times out of 10, forgets the bag of leftovers at the restaurant.

Though I am exceedingly squeamish, when my son was born, I was shocked that I saw only the beauty of childbirth. Until the placenta came out. There are many normal human reactions to seeing a placenta, ranging from screaming to vomiting to warding it off with a cross. For those of you who have never seen one, the placenta is to the baby what Stephen Baldwin is to Alec Baldwin. It's what your liver would look like if it got into an accident on the autobahn with one of those aliens from Mars Attacks! and their bloody carcasses threw jellyfish at each other.

When the placenta did come out, Cassandra, dazed from 21 hours of labor, somehow made sure the nurses delivered it to us in a flat plastic container, which I put into an ice-filled Monsters vs Aliens cooler I brought. When I asked if I could keep the placenta overnight in the refrigerator out in the hall, the nurses looked at me like I was crazy. When you gross out people who work at a hospital, you have accomplished something.

In a fog, I drove the placenta home, where I wrapped the container in a bag and wrapped that bag in a bag and wrapped that bag in every remaining bag we had in the house. I slept at the hospital that night, grateful that my son will never remember what his parents just did.

The next day I drove back to the house to meet the placenta lady, Sara Pereira. To my surprise, Sara did not look unkempt, frumpy, heavy or in any way like a Wiccan. She got into placenta-cooking after taking a Chinese-medicine course and has already prepared more than two dozen placentas this year — and orders are picking up rapidly. When I asked Sara if her parents were embarrassed by what she does, she told me that her father sells bull semen.

By law, Sara has to cook the placenta at the placenta owner's home. But to my great relief, she brought her own equipment, gloves, sponges and even more detergent than I'd hoped, scrubbing constantly as she worked. If I ever kill a man in my own home, I am totally calling the placenta lady.

As she steamed the placenta with some herbs, the kitchen got that ironlike smell of cooked organ meat, with vague undertones of a consciousness-raising group and a Betty Friedan rally. Sara said Cassandra had a particularly robust placenta, and she hoped to get 120 pills out of it. As she sliced the cooked organ and put it on parchment paper in a dehydrator, she told me that some people drink the placenta raw as a smoothie. "I do this for a living, and I couldn't do that," she said. The pills, she explained, were superior, since Cassandra could stretch their hormone-rich benefits much further, perhaps even freezing some for menopause. Sara did not understand that when Cassandra's looks fade in her 50s, there's no way I'm putting up with this crapI drove back to the hospital where, thanks to my experiences, the food looked good. When we got home the following day, Sara gave us a truly beautiful placentapill presentation: a pretty glass jar, a card, a CD of lullabies and a satin pouch. In which was part of my son's umbilical cord, fashioned into a heart. When I asked Sara what the hell I was supposed to do with that, she said people often use it to keep a baby's first tooth and lock of hair. That's when I realized that placenta-eating is really just the beginning of how gross we humans are. And I went to change my first diaper.

Pacha Mama?

Pachamama is a goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes. Pachamama is usually translated as Mother Earth, but a more literal translation would be "Mother world" (in Aymara and Quechua mama = mother / pacha = world or land; and later widened in a modern meaning as the cosmos or the universe).

 Pachamama and Inti are the most benevolent deities; they are worshiped in parts of the Andean mountain ranges, also known as Tawantinsuyu (the former Inca Empire) (stretching from present day Ecuador to Chile and northern Argentina being present day Peru the center of the empire with its capital city in Cuzco).

In Inca mythology, Mama Pacha or Pachamama is a fertility goddess who presides over planting and harvesting. Since Pachamama is a "good mother", people usually toast to her honor before every meeting or festivity, in some regions by spilling a small amount of chicha (wine or something similar) on the floor, before drinking the rest. This toast is called challa and it is made almost every day.

PACHA

The etymological meaning of Pacha is "thing" or "phenomenon". There are two elements, double on itself and a projection on other, the other is outside of itself, outside of its thought and outside of its environment. It is expression of the whole, space and simultaneous time, it is expressed by the diversity of the life; as a global knowledge that it is generator of the culture and the life of the Ancestral Indigenous Nations. It is territorial space -Pachamama- and cosmic space. It is expression of the space and the known and stranger time. In the cosmos, the Pacha is life and source of life, is wisdom and ignorance, "sacred and profane"   The Pacha is the inhabited territory and the unknown space (uninhabited), whose set of compatible elements is always in function of this partiality.

 MAMA / TAYKA

 It comes from the Aymara language and its etymological meaning is "mother". It is territorial space that includes natural resources and also production ecosystem, that implies natural environment as well. There is no distinction between profane and sacred, where abiotic becomes biotic. It is protective and source of wisdom and life. Pachatayka or Mother of the fertility. It is also the main principle of the generation of life : human, plants, animals, and all whatever exists in the whole time and space. Pachamama is usually associated with agricultural fertility. From this perspective, it has relation with other spirits multipliers of animals (illa), plants (ispalla) and minerals (mama). Moreover, it is defined as a tutelary spirit. In the Pachamama everything is sacred, so each community, each saya and even each small farm has its protective Pachamama. However, at the same time, the Pachamama is also universal and is anywhere. Therefore, Pachamama is considered as the main spirit of "this world".

DEPICTIONS OF PACHA MAMA

What is a Doula?

A doula (pronounced "doó la"), also known as a labour coach - originates from the Ancient Greek word δούλη meaning female servant)

A Doula is a non-medical person who assists a woman before, during, or after childbirth, as well as her partner and/or family by providing information, physical assistance, and emotional support. The provision of continuous support during labour by doulas (as well as nurses, family, or friends) is associated with improved maternal and fetal health and a variety of other benefits.

In contrast to the goal of medical professionals (a safe childbirth), the goal of a doula is to ensure the mother feels safe and confident before, during, and after delivery.