Gestational Diabetes – Part 2

In case you missed it:
Part 1 What is it and how to test

Let’s Talk About Diet

Now that you know a little bit about Gestational Diabetes, what it is and how to test for it (discussed in part 1), let’s talk about diet.

I mentioned that women diagnosed with GD should always measure your glucose levels fasting and postprandial. In my opinion, if a woman has higher than normal blood sugar numbers, it would be good to measure glucose prior to going to bed to see if the woman needs a snack. I find that in some women, that final reading is the most useful.

As I said before, pregnancy is a naturally insulin resistance stage. During the night fast, when no calories are consumed, the body works harder to prevent insulin from doing its job, so that more glucose is available for the fetus. Fetuses are not like us. They don’t need 3 square meals and 2 snacks a day, or whatever your eating patterns are, they need fuel constantly throughout the 24 hours to grow leaps & bounds and to go through those amazing changes that they go through daily. This is the reason why, most women who seek my help come to me because their first morning reading is elevated, off the charts, maybe 100 or 105, but their glucose numbers after meals are all in the range. The baby needs food, and after a woman has been fasting for 8 hours, 7 hours, is it physiologically normal for blood sugar to be higher than 90 mg of deciliter of blood.

For women with high fasting glucose, it can be helpful to set an alarm for around 3 or 4 in the morning and have a snack. Usually a snack at that time is what tricks the glucose meter into having a better reading in the morning. It also provides the baby with fuel.

Make sure your snack is composed of proteins and fats. A hard-boiled egg, celery sticks with nut butter or guacamole. Avocadoes are a wonderful food for pregnant women & their baby’s. As are sardines, canned tuna. But who wants to eat those foods at 4 in the morning? So the best bet is to have half an apple with a few nuts or peanut butter, a hard-boiled egg, some women can tolerate cheese or full-fat yogurt.

I have never seen a salad satisfy a pregnant women or building a baby. It’s hard to tell a pregnant woman to eat salads for the rest of her pregnancy and they aren’t going to get the nutrition that they need.

The diet for pregnant mothers, Gestational Diabetes or not, is a diet full of healthy fats, soluble vitamins and mineral, and moderate amount of proteins.

It is true that there is not one perfect diet, and that the diet that better suites our needs depends on our ancestry, where we are from, what foods are available in our region, our activity level, etc. It is safe to say that some people may need more carbohydrates, some people may need more fat, but generally speaking, to build a healthy baby we want a lot of fat soluble vitamins in the form of A, D, E, and K. these fat soluble nutrients come and are absorbed in the presence of fatty acids. They are foods that help with the development of the brain, the immune system and the skeletal system of the fetus. Having plenty of these nutrients allow a mother to build a baby without robbing her own stores. The fetus is still considered a parasite, because it is allowed to steal nutrients that are on reserve for the mother. There is a saying that goes “with each pregnancy, here goes a tooth.” Those women did not eat/absorb enough calcium while pregnant, so their body broke down the calcium stored in the bone tissue, and of course, teeth, to make calcium available for the healthy baby, finding themselves depleted at the end of the pregnancy.

If you’re not eating the right kind of foods, it doesn’t matter how many calories you bring in. If they are empty calories, in the forms of processed, refined, white foods, then your body isn’t going to get the nutrients that it needs to help healthy babies and that’s when your stores are going to be touched upon. It’s like having a bank account. If you keep taking out money without putting it in, eventually you’re going to be at a zero balance and eventually you’re going to get negative. That is what happens to most women.

Microbirth – What happens during birth? Webinar

Scientists start to link the way babies are born to health later in life.

Join Mama Tribe Network’s life streaming event and guest panelists Francesca Orlando, NTP, CGP and Linda F. Palmer, DC to discuss the film MICROBIRTH and the Q&A session to follow in February 21, 2015 in San Diego.

 

The Roles Of Bacteria In Our Body

We are 90% bacterial and 10% mammalian. We have more microorganisms living within us than we have cells in our body.

The newest research that explores the micro-biome is making gigantic advances, and now more than ever science is focusing on the integrity and diversity (or lack of thereof) of our bacteria.

Most autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes, Hashimoto’s, Lupus, MS and the obesity epidemics are steady on the rise, and scientific studies show that there is a common component in all of these disease: a change in the micro-biome.
Numerous studies are even linking autoimmune conditions directly to lack of healthy bacteria in our gut.

People living in civilized countries have 1/3 of the bacteria of people living in primitive societies, who are not affected by the disease of modern man.

Babies are born with a sterile gut (though some initial research shows that there may be exposure to bacteria in the placenta to a certain extent) and they receive their first mouthful of bacteria as the descend the birth canal.
This fantastic documentary shows how the raise in cesarian births is one of the causes of this drastic changes in our micro-biome.

Join me at the screening of this amazing scientific documentary (or schedule an appointment) to learn what functions bacteria has in our body, how nutrition can affect the health or lack of thereof of our bacteria, and how to establish it and preserve even if you have to have a c-section or repeated course of antibiotics and other drugs that alter the composition of our flora.

References:

 

Gestational Diabetes – Part 1

What it is and how to test?

Gestational Diabetes is a condition characterized by higher than normal blood sugar levels during pregnancy.

Before I talk about GD, I think it is important to say that pregnancy is a insulin resistance stage. In simple terms, this means that the body of a pregnant woman (as well as the placenta) is programmed to destroy some of the circulating insulin. Insulin is the hormone that carries glucose away from the blood stream and into the tissue. During pregnancy, certain hormones produced by the mother, and certain hormones produced by the placenta inactivate insulin so that more glucose is available to the fetus for growth.

This is a natural physiological state. Remember that our species has evolved during some 77,000 generations going through famines and food scarcity, interrupted by times of feast following a kill. We used to be hunter and gatherers, we definitely did not have supermarket to go buy pickles and ice cream to feed our pregnant tribe members J

Fortunately, many of us nowadays have not that issue, but our bodies are still hardwire to function the same way as they did hundreds of thousands of years. Therefore, our bodies are kind of working against us when we eat day in and day out & when we eat the wrong food.

Let’s talk about testing for a moment. In my opinion, the conventional GD test is flawed. Think about this: how many times do you ingest 75 grams of pure high fructose corn syrup plus additives, and plus colorings in your daily life? Hopefully never! Some women’s body can handle the test just fine, but others are extremely sensitive to sugar, especially if they restrict sugar intake in their diet. I, personally, follow a no grain diet, and while I passed the Gestational Diabetes test with flying colors, I felt dizzy, I felt nauseous, and I felt shaky. My body is not used to handle that much sugar…

If you are working with an open-minded health care provider, there are some options you can discuss with them. Hopefully your OBGYN or midwife has already run a HA1C test. Usually it is done in the first trimester. This test gives a measure of how your body is metabolizing sugars for the past 3 months. Usually, if the numbers are abnormal (a number above 5.5 indicates pre-diabetic state, above 5.7 indicates diabetic state), an open minder health care provider can recommend that women start measuring their blood glucose levels fasting, and one hour after each meal.

Of course you can choose to have the test done. I actually did have it done because my provider did not offer an alternative.

Now you know a little bit about Gestational Diabetes, what it is and how to test for it.

Continue to Part 2: Diets for Gestational Diabetes  

This website collects cookies. Please read our Privacy Policy to review the updates about which cookies we use and what information we collect on our site. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our updated privacy policy.