Is your gut baby-ready?
One of the things I focus most on in my practice and love to spread awareness about is the importance of women preparing their bodies for pregnancy. When we enter the baby-planning stage with our partners, we typically like to ensure our relationship is stable, we are financially ready, and we are mentally and emotionally ready (Parents reading this know we’re never really any of those things!). We tend to forget that pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding are all HUGE physical demands that utilize many of our body’s resources. If our bodies aren’t functioning optimally, we put ourselves at greater risk for pregnancy/birth complications, postpartum mood disorders, and adverse health consequences for baby.
There are many ways to prepare your body for pregnancy, and one of the most important factors is gut health. Did you know your gut health becomes your baby’s gut health? We all have a particular and individualized gut microbiome that is ideally full of good bacteria, which break down our food and help us digest. This allows us to extract the nutrients our bodies need, and get rid of the stuff we don’t. It is said that about 70% of our immune system function comes from our gut, and these good gut bugs are largely responsible for keeping us healthy and safe from infections. In order to keep our gut microbiome diverse and healthy, we need to eat plenty of prebiotics (good gut bug food) from a variety of sources. The best prebiotics we have access to don’t come from a supplement, but from plants. The more variation we have of plants in our diet, the more likely we are to have a thriving and healthy microbiome.
Alterations in our microbiome-called dysbiosis-can cause bad gut bugs to overrun the good guys, which leads to a break down of the gut lining. When this happens, larger than normal particles can pass through the gut barrier and wreak havoc on our bodies. Dysbiosis in the gut has been link to a myriad of chronic diseases such as autoimmunity, obesity, hypertension, inflammatory bowel disease, and even things like behavioral issues, dementia, and cancer. During a normal and healthy pregnancy, the dramatic changes in the hormones Estrogen and Progesterone affect and change the gut microbiome, leading to a slight increases in inflammation. However, if woman goes into pregnancy with pre-existing dysbiosis, these hormonal shifts can cause excessive inflammation and further break down of the gut lining. When the gut is compromised, the gut-brain axis-necessary for appropriate signaling from the brain during pregnancy-is also compromised. The impact of this compromise has been linked to both maternal and child health consequences such as intestinal disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, postpartum mood disorders, maternal autoimmunity, and many more.
We are just beginning to understand the impact gut health has on our bodies. We are starting to see that what we put into and onto our bodies matter, and that the mass processing of our food is having huge adverse consequences. There is perhaps no other time when our diets become more important than when we decide to create a baby. If possible, getting with a functional medicine doctor to assess blood work and come up with a game plan to prepare your body for pregnancy in advance is ideal. In some cases it can take up to a year to prepare! If you’re like me, however, and pregnancy snuck up on you, it is never too late to make dietary changes that are optimal for a healthy gut. It’s a super confusing time to know what to eat with all of the conflicting information out there about nutrition, but there are common threads between pretty much every research diet and they are:
eat lots of organic plants
steer clear of food that come in packages/boxes/windows.
These two changes can influence our gut and overall health in a big way!
Much love on your health journey,
Dr. Chelsea Rackham