In case you missed it:
– Part 1 What is it and how to test
– Part 2 Let’s talk about diet
How To Navigate The Supermarket
Remember that during pregnancy you are building a human being “from scratch”. To build a healthy baby you need to consume high quality proteins and fats. I would like all of my pregnant clients to eat foods as they come in nature, as close as they can get to their natural state.
One trustworthy principle I always tell my clients (pregnant and not) is to remember that real food doesn’t come in a box. Real food is what you find along the perimeter of a supermarket, the fruits and veggies, the dairy, the fish, the beef and other animal products, the eggs, the butter, the olive oil.
When we enter the aisles of the supermarkets, we generally find shiny packages that “scream” to be low fat, low cholesterol, low this, high in that, those foods have been processed, they have been stripped and refined, and then they have been enriched with a handful of synthetic vitamins & minerals that have no place in our body. Our body does not know how to use them and our baby’s body doesn’t know how to use them either.
Let’s start with this, real food doesn’t have a label. But if you do eat something out of a package, look for a food that has 5 or fewer ingredients, ingredients that you can pronounce. Make sure that you do not need a biochemistry degree to read a label. Such food has no place is your pregnant body.
If you buy a packaged food, check the label and look at the grams of sugar. Particularly if you are diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes, the food must have 6 grams of sugar or less. But remember, every carbohydrate is converted into glucose in the body. So if you look at the label & it has 0 grams of sugar but 40 grams of carbohydrates, you have to know that those 40 grams of carbohydrate will be converted into sugar. So, per this example, if a food label lists 0 grams of sugar but 40 grams of carbohydrates, you probably don’t want to eat it & you want to look for something that has 15 grams of carbohydrates or less.
Another thing to pay attention to when eating out of a box is portion size. A portion of Pringles is a small handful of chips. But some people can easily get to the end of the can without even realizing it. So you are probably getting 4, 5, 6 times the amount of macronutrients that are listed on the label. In addition to this, by law, manufacturers are allowed to list 0 grams of trans fat even though a portion size may contain up to 0.5 grams of trans fat. Nobody eats 5 Pringles, so by the time you are done with your can of Pringles, you’ve eaten 3, 4, 5 grams of trans fat. Trans fats are a poison that we all should aim at avoiding, especially when we are expecting.
I love how you broke it down so simply that even though it says it is enriched/fortified/etc that it doesn’t mean it is good for you.