Jessie Inchauspé: 90% of Pregnant People Are Missing THIS Nutrient (Follow THIS Simple Diet To Reduce Glucose Spikes & Protect Your Baby’s Brain & Metabolism)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And so ninety percent of mothers today are eating a
diet that is not giving them the right nutrients for
their baby to grow. Your diet during pregnancy is calibrating
things in your child. It's setting his metabolism, the number
of brain cells he has. It's setting his resilience or
his sensitivity to disease.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to on Purpose, the place you
come to become the happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's
guest is us welcoming back one of your favorites. When
she came on the show last time, she absolutely made
an impact on each and every one of you. I
know so many of you commented, shared, and messaged in
saying how much her advice has changed your life. She's

(00:44):
changed my life for the better, my wife's, are parents,
everyone that we know when we've been talking about her advice. Today,
I'm talking again to the one and only glucose goddess, biochemist,
best selling author, and viral science teacher, Jesse in Shoppe,
whose work creatures millions of people around the world and
it's transformed how we think about food and health. Jesse

(01:06):
is here to talk about her new book, Nine Months
That Count forever. How your pregnancy diet shapes your baby's future.
Releasing March seventeenth. If you haven't already ordered it, make
sure you get it right now as you're listening to
this conversation. If you're expecting or hope to be one day,
the Science Back Guide reveals how what you eat during

(01:28):
pregnancy doesn't just affect you, it can shape your child's
health for a lifetime. Please welcome back to On Purpose Jesse. Jesse,
it is so great to be back.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Thank you so much for having me back to JA
and thank you for calling me a science teacher. That
makes me happy.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
I mean, your resume is amazing, but you're a dear friend,
and you know, last time you came on, we were
just getting to know each other and we hit it
off so well. We just ended up hanging out and talking.
And this book, I know, means so much to you,
and it's been such an incredible journey for you. You
were just showing me a beautiful video of your baby boy,
and this journey is one that I don't think it's

(02:03):
talked about enough. And as a man who will never
get pregnant and not experience what it feels like, I've
definitely seen how so many of my friends feel misinformed,
so many feel underinformed, so many feel misled. But the
biggest thing I think that I want to start with
is so many people feel that you can eat whatever
you want when you're pregnant. There's really no rules. Why

(02:24):
do you disagree with that?

Speaker 1 (02:26):
There are many myths around pregnancy. That's one of them.
There's the myth that you should eat for two, the
myth that you're going to gain weight anyway, so it's
the perfect time to eat all the stuff you never
usually eat that you don't think you should eat because
they're not good for you. There's another myth around your
baby will get what he needs from you. And I

(02:47):
think the main myth jay is that when you're pregnant,
you have a bun in the oven. Have you heard
that expression?

Speaker 2 (02:55):
I have heard that expression.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Okay, so I was told when I was pregnant by
people in the street, oh, you have a butt in
the oven. And I think this is where most of
our problems starts, because as I was thinking about this metaphor,
I thought, there's so many things wrong with this sentence. First,
it implies that as the mom, you are an oven,
meaning matter says that you are this passive box of

(03:21):
heat and time. It implies that when you're pregnant, all
you gotta do is keep the temperature at the right
temperature and just wait. And then it also implies something
a bit more subtle, because if you bake something like
if you're making I don't know, a brownie, the moment
you put the brownie in the oven, it's gonna stay
a brownie. The oven doesn't change the recipe, right, So

(03:43):
it implies that your baby the moment that the sperm
meets the egg. It implies that at that point, the
baby is set in stone and that all you gotta
do is wait and let nature do its thing, and
the baby's gonna come out. I learned in the science
that actually what happens during the nine months, and specifically
what you eat during the nine months co creates the baby.

(04:08):
So if you eat two different diets, a different baby
will come out. Your diet during pregnancy is calibrating things
in your child. It's setting his metabolism, the number of
brain cells he has. It's setting his resilience or his
sensitivity to disease. It's like you are a co creator

(04:28):
when you're pregnant. You're not an oven. A better metaphor
is being soil out of which your baby's little seed growing.
Like you have a beautiful garden. Right If I were
to give you a seed for an apple tree, and
I said, Jay, you have two options. You can plant
this seed in your driveway where it's just rocks and gravel,
or you can plant it in the soil in the sun.

(04:51):
You know, intuitively you should plant it in the soil
in the sun because even if that seed has the
same genetic plan, where you plant it is going to
determine how it adapts and what it becomes. And as
the mom, you're the soil. And it's a lot of
responsibility for sure. And I felt that too, But the
science I discovered helped me navigate that responsibility more easily.
And that's what I want to share with people today.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Is it simple enough for someone who's not educated on this?
I myself? Is it simple enough to be able to
say this food links to this and this food links
to this, like is it that?

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Or it is that simple?

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Really? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (05:24):
It is that simple?

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
So, in the studies, I discovered these four main nutrients
that have an outsized effect on your baby's long term
health during pregnancy. The first one is glucose. Glucose you
meet again, So the amount of glucose circulating in your
bloodstream during pregnancy is going to program your baby's DNA
to be more or less vulnerable to Type two diabetes

(05:48):
later in life. Second one is coaling. Coaling is found
in eggs and it builds your baby's brain. And we
know that if there's not enough coaling in a brain
during pregnancy, while the brain will be formed with fewer neurons.
Neurons are the brain cells that process information. Third one
is protein. During pregnancy, you need to eat more protein
than usual, and animal studies show us that if you

(06:09):
have too little protein, the baby comes out smaller and
with a setting to keep his muscle mass low for life.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Wow. Yes.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
And the fourth one is omega three's. Omega threes are
a type of fat that come from algae in the ocean,
and this fat also builds a baby's brain. And we see,
for example, studies that show that if you have enough
omega threees during pregnancy, you can measure a higher IQ
in a baby at four years old.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
No.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yes, So as I was discovering this, I was making
that same pace, I was like, what, why is there
such a gap between what science knows and what parents
are told? And that's the gap that I'm hoping to
bridge because this stuff is essential.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
So Einstein's mom basically had an amazing diet.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Well, who knows, maybe she didn't know this stuff. I
think back in the day they ate a little more
organ metes and you know, foods with high nutritions. So
maybe she did have a better diet. Because the problem
is today most of us are eating a diet of
processed foods. It's not our fault, the food industry marketing messages,
and so ninety percent of mothers today are eating a

(07:14):
diet that is not giving them the right nutrients for
their baby to grow. So ninety percent of moms today
are missing one of these crucial nutrients. For calling, it's
ninety percent of moms, and not getting enough. For protein
it's seventy percent, for omega threes, it's seventy five percent.
And for glucose, while most moms today eat three times

(07:35):
the recommended amount of sugar during pregnancy. And it's not
their fault. Jay, this is really important. The food industry
or food landscape has created this toxic environment and we're
all trying to eat as well as we can, but
the system has failed us.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
What's the negative impact of, for example, that three times
the glucose not enough of the omega three is not
enough protein? Like? What how bad can it get? And
what are the sad experiences that my does it having
during in post pregnancy that they may not even be
connecting to those things.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
So for colin, for example, we know that when moms
have very low levels of coline it can lead to
more brain defects that can end in miscarriage. Doctors will
often tell you about folate. This is the only thing
my doctor told me, He said, take folate supplement. Everybody
talks about this, and it's because low folate levels are
also linked to higher risk of miscarriage. Nobody talks about coline,

(08:26):
but it's just as important. So that's the main one
in terms of colin. Like, if you don't have enough collin,
your baby will be fine. Right, maybe his brain will
be formed a little bit less optimally, but will be fine.
My mom didn't eat any eggs when she was pregnant
with me. When it comes to glucose, if you have
very high sugar diet during pregnancy, and if your blood
glucose levels are very high, we know that it means

(08:48):
that your baby will be more likely to develop type
two diabetes. For example, there is this condition called gestational diabetes,
which means the diabetes of pregnancy, which means just having
very high blood sugar during pregnancy. And when we look
at the kids of moms who have gestational diabetes, twenty
one percent of the kids will have developed diabetes by

(09:11):
age twenty two versus four percent of kids of moms
who did not have gestational diabetes. And this is a
big deal j because if you develop diabetes as a teenager,
you have fifteen years of life just knocked off. You're
an average going to live fifteen few years in your peers,
And there's all these incredible studies done on millions of
women's statistics like this that are mind blowing. Even siblings

(09:34):
jay if one was developing in the womb of the
mother when she had gestational diabetes, and if he has
a sibling that was developing in the womb when the
mom did not have diabetes, the sibling developing during the
diabetes has a four time increased risk in developing himself
diabetes in his lifetime, so what's going on? Like, why
is this going on? So one of the main things

(09:56):
we need to understand about pregnancy is that while you're
baby's DNA is set in stone when the sperm meets
the egg, there's something else that is not set in stone,
and that's called epigenetics. It's a complicated word, but it
simply means that there are these tiny little microscopic switches

(10:17):
like the dimmer switch on a light, that control our
genes and that say this gene more activated, this gene
more silenced. Epigenetics switches on your baby's DNA. And these
epigenetics where do they come from. They come from the
environment that you provide during pregnancy. So as a pregnant mom,
you are programming your child's DNA with what you eat.

(10:40):
And in particular, when it comes to diabetes, we see
that moms with very high glucose levels have babies who
have the genes linked to diabetes that are activated at
birth and this setting can stay with them for life.
So it's like the moment they're born, they're born with
this innate vulnerability to that condition. So that's colin and

(11:02):
glucose for protein, This is fascinating, and I know you're vegan,
so I think protein is a big one for you. Okay.
So animal studies show us that if a mom doesn't
have enough protein during pregnancy, even if she has enough calories,
so it's not about she doesn't have enough food, it's
specifically she doesn't have enough protein. This is an animal studies.

(11:25):
They see that the babies are born with epigenetic switches
that say keep your muscle mass small. It's as if
low protein during pregnancy is sending a message to my baby,
saying to him, hey, baby, you're going to be born
into her world with not a lot of protein, so
you should keep your muscle mass small. Wow, So he's

(11:47):
getting a message. Your baby's getting information about the world
he's going to be born into with what you're eating
during pregnancy. He can't see anything. He can kind of
hear through the water, but you know it's muffled, and
he's like, like, what kind of world am I being
born into? Because as he's creating his organs his brain
from scratch, he needs information and your diet is providing information.

(12:09):
So if you have a very low protein diet, your
baby's gonna think, Okay, I got to create my body
and set up myself in a way that I'm going
to survive optimally in a low protein world. This moment
of pregnancy is preparing him for the rest of his life.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Is there a recommended protein amount for pregnant months.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yes, so for a long time it was too low,
and recent studies that are using a very fancy new
technique have found that it's fifty percent higher than we thought.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
That's a lot.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
That's a lot because when you think about it, protein
is not just muscle. So many things in your body
are protein, like your immune system, like the molecules that
make up your skin, like all of your hormones, I
mean most of your hormones. So basically, we now know
that during pregnancy you need about one point five or
one point six grams of protein per day per kilo

(13:01):
of body weight. So that's about one hundred grams of protein,
give or take. Today's seventy five percent of moms and
not getting that amount. So most of us are sending
a signal to our baby without even knowing we're doing that.
Of there's not a lot of protein in the world
you're about to be born into. And when I was
reading the signs. I was like, huh. I have these
two friends, Gabriel and Nicholas. Okay, they have kind of

(13:23):
the same diet and they do pretty much the same exercise.
One builds muscle masks super easily and the other one
struggles so much to put on muscle, And I was wondering, well,
maybe one of the reasons is their programming from the
womb when they were in their mother's belly. Yeah, so
we're not equal like who we are today, you and me.

(13:45):
We're going to be more or less vulnerable to things
depending on what happened when our mom was pregnant with us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
I mean, and you can feel that as well, like
you can as you were saying certain things. I'm like,
I need to go ask my mom what she was eating.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
One that's what I did. Did you do? I called her?
I was like, Mom, okay, little list here, how much
Colin did you have? How many eggs? Was like, no,
it was the nineties, honey, Like in nineies, we only
ate sugar and low fat foods. Man, that's why that
makes sense.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
That's why you're so smart. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
No, but actually, you know, I'm fine. But if I'm honest,
I'm okay, But if I'm honest, day, like, I struggled
with mental health my whole life. When I was twenty
five years old, I was on the cusp of pre diabetes. Like,
clearly I had a vulnerability to pre diabetes. Maybe it
was because my mom only ate sugar and special K
when she was pregnant. We don't know, ye, We're never

(14:35):
going to know. But all the animal studies, the decades
of studies on animals that we have, point to the
fact that what happens during pregnancy sets up a baby
for life. And it's very clear.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
If you were talking to a room full of pregnant
mums right now who just starting their journey, they're nine months,
they're all going to take a copy of your book
away home because it's going to help them through the
next nine months. What's the first thing you'd want them
to know today that's gonna shift the next nine months.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
I would say the first three months. Don't worry about
anything I'm saying, because nausea is usually so bad that
you can't eat anything of remote nutritional value.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
So any way of avoiding that nasa that there's nothing.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Well, if it's really bad, the medication you can take
but for most of us you just have to wait
it out. There's a little few things you can do.
You can make sure your blood sugar levels are balanced,
so use all of my hacks from my previous work.
Protein in the morning, protein basically all the time. It's
the only thing that can help really balance the nausea.

(15:35):
I would even keep some almonds by the side of
my bed and have them before I got up, Like
I would literally open my eyes, not move, put my
hand to the side, grabbed t almonds, put them in
the mouth, and then get up Like that's how bad
it was. Wow, you could do that. Ginger helps. Exercise
also helps, actually, but mostly it just sucks.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Man. Did you try anything that was crazy or like
a myth and then busted it and realize this doesn't
work for you.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
I was like, I'm the glucose freaking goddess and I
know all this stuff, and all I could I've been
able to eat for the past month is croissant, and.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
That sounds amazing.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
No, it's because the crabs were the only thing that
didn't make you want to throw up.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
But for the first three months, yeah, you're okay.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
Well, the first three months you do what you can
if you're not nauseous, use everything in this book. And
what I would say to pregnant moms is, okay, first
trimester is kind of unique. Do what you can. Then
I would say, eat four eggs a day because four
eggs are going to give your baby all the coling
that he needs. Two, make sure you have a protein

(16:38):
every single meal. This is going to give you a
baby enough protein. Three have fish or supplement with omega threes.
I did that every day. Two grams of omiga threes
every day, which is more than you might think. And
four watch your sugar because cravings are strong during pregnant.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
That's what I was about to say. So the cravings
is not a myth, that's a real thing.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
Depending on who you are, you're going to have different cravings.
Like I was craving Qwy's and red meats.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
And you don't love Kewe's in general, I don't.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Care about Kewy's, Like I've.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
Never thought Kew's playing that to me? How does that happen?

Speaker 1 (17:12):
Well, okay, so the Iris.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Story is just like a fun thing that theory goes.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
No, the theory goes and strawberries. I could eat pounds
of strawberries, no reason. I don't even really like strawberries.
I don't care. The theory goes that your body is
making cravings that have to do with things that you're
missing in your diets. For example, why was I craving
strawberries and kewy Maybe because of the vitamin C. Some
moms crave pickles why and scientists believe they know why

(17:40):
because pickles contain salt and iodine, and iodine is very
important during pregnancy. I was craving red meat because I
was very low in iron, So maybe the red meat
was a way of getting iron. We don't really know.
A lot of this stuff is a mystery, JA Like,
first of all, we can't really run a lot of
studies on pregnant moms. Yeah, of course, so it's a
little bit complicated. And second we know some things, but

(18:01):
a lot of stuff we don't really understand yet. It's
quite it's a miracle that you're building another human in
your body. I mean wow. So I would say for
eggs a day, enough protein supplement with Omega three's and
watch your sugar. Try to stay under the recommendation of
the World Health Organization, which is twenty five grams of
sugar or less per day. Now, this is something we

(18:24):
need to unpack. Twenty five grams of sugar is not
a lot. It's the amount of sugar in one glass
of orange juice, in like half a chocolate bar, or
in two cookies. It's not a lot. Yeah, And most
moms today, the surveys show that they actually eat more
sugar when they're pregnant than when they're not pregnant. Two

(18:46):
reasons for this one cravings and some studies on rats
show that when you're pregnant, you get more enjoyment out
of sugar. It's like your brain rewires and you get
more dopamine when you eat sugar than before.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
I don't even need to get pregnant to know that.
I'm like, sugar is like my my what do you
call it? It's like my not guilty pleasure. It's it's
like my kryptonite. Yeah, that's right, when I'm there. Yeah,
it's taken me years to train myself off of sugar.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
So imagine when you're pregnant, your brain is like well,
the animal studies so that your brain might be just
more sensitive. So the same cookie is bringing you more enjoyment.
So it's like it's intense. You have to deal with that.
And then there's society telling you, oh, you're pregnant, eat
for two, you know, have more sugar, have a cookie,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
What are you actually eating for that idea of you're
eating for two? Are you just eating for one? Like?

Speaker 1 (19:36):
Why?

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Why is it?

Speaker 1 (19:37):
Again? Like one point right?

Speaker 2 (19:39):
So the double is a mistake because you could overdose
on the sugar.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
It's a total myth. Like for example, for glucose. So
glucose comes from carbs. So like bread, pasta, rice or
cake and fruit, those are foods that contain glucose. They're
called carbohydrates carbs. You might think, oh, I'm pregnant, I
need to eat like way more pasta, way more sugar.
You don't. The studies show us that in the very
end of pregnancy, when your baby's about to be born,

(20:05):
so he's as big as he's going to get, he
only needs a very small amount of glucose per day.
Seventy grams of glucose per day. That's about the amount
of glucose in a cup and a half of rice.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
At the very end of pregnancy, you need one cup
and a half of rice. Extra per day. At the
beginning of pregnancy, you need no extra glucose second trimester,
very little. So we need to tell people about this
very important information. And you might think, Jay, Okay, well,
if a baby needs seventy grams of glucose, surely he
just takes that and he doesn't take more. This is

(20:41):
another misconception. Your baby does not just take what he needs.
Your baby takes what is there. If there's more glucose
in your bloodstream than he needs, he's going to also
register more glucose in his body than what he needs.
So that's why we see that at birth, some babies
have super super high glucose levels and others have normal
glucose levels. Because it's all dependent on the mom's own

(21:04):
glucose levels. You're connected, you're connected. It's like, if it's
high in your blood, it's going to be high in
your baby's blood. If it's low in your blood, it's
going to be low in your baby's blood. If you
don't eat any eggs or any calling whatsoever, your baby
is not going to get enough. And that's the whole point.
You have to learn about this stuff because nobody's telling you.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Unfortunately, yeah, I can't believe that this hasn't become necessary
learning in life. I remember people always talking about this
idea or off. You go to the hospital, you give birth,
and then you come home with a human being, and
there's no exam, there's no test, there's no education. You know,
we obviously have to take a driving test, right, We

(21:45):
take exams to get jobs. It just feels like having
a baby feels bigger and harder than all of those things.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
I think you'd think that, because it's biological, you just
know how to do it, and you'd think that society
would naturally support it to the best of its abilities.
But actually the food around us today is failing moms.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
If someone is eating a diet of processed foods, they're
obviously not getting all these key markers, the four that
you keep telling us, what's happening to that baby? What
kind of nutrients is it getting?

Speaker 1 (22:30):
It's getting what it can. The mother's reserves are going
to be defeated up to a point. There's a limits
because biology will always favor the mom staying alive, So
all of the mom's coline is going to get given
to the baby. But up to a point, the mom's
muscle mass is going to start shedding to give the
baby protein. The mom's omega three reserves are going to
go all to the baby, but again with a limit,

(22:53):
Like if you don't eat any of these foods, your
baby will not get enough, quite simply. And I mean
same with sugar. Right, It's like, if you eat a
lot of sugar, your baby's gonna be processing a lot
of sugar. Now, humans are resilient and nature has a way,
and so the baby will probably be fine, probably, but
you're silently setting up that baby for more vulnerability. You're

(23:16):
silently programming is genes a bit more towards disease. You're
probably shaping his brain in a way that's not optimal.
For example, the brain. So today, Jay, you have about
one hundred billion neurons in your brain. Can you feel them?

Speaker 2 (23:29):
No? I hope.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
So you have about one hundred billion neurons, and these
are the brain cells that connect information, that process information.
These are the same neurons that you had the day
you were born. Wow, neurons never get replaced. They stay
with you from the moment you're born until you die.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
So they're getting older.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
They're getting older, and most importantly, all your neurons give
or take five percent were created when your mom was
pregnant with you, and coline and omega are super important
to creating those neurons. And so depending on how much
colin and omegathees your mom was having, your brain will

(24:09):
be shaped differently in the studies than on animals. Again,
because we can do this in humans, scientists will reduce
the amount of colin and omega threes in the mom's diet,
and then when the baby's born, they look at the
brains very very closely under the microscope and they see
that if there's very low levels of colin, the babies
have fewer neurons and a smaller brain. And they see

(24:31):
that if the baby had lower, very low levels of
omega threes in the womb, when they put the baby
through some tests to see intelligence and how crick they
can get out of mazes. For example, the babies with
very low omega threes in the roomb take four times
as long to find the maze. So you probably don't
know it, but you're walking around with a brain that
has a few cracks because of your mom not having

(24:52):
enough colin and.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Data, Why are you assuming that?

Speaker 1 (24:55):
And listen me too, right, most of our moms where
a generation that was not given this information, and again
the food system has been failing them.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
Do you recommend people getting those from supplements or from food?
And what does that look like?

Speaker 1 (25:08):
Food is always better absorbed and always cheaper. However, if
you don't eat any animal fruits, you should take the supplements.
It's just going to be much easier. For example, colin,
so four eggs a day is the amount you need
for your baby. If you're vegan, that would mean you
have to eat eight pounds of soybeans per day, eight

(25:30):
pounds to get enough coling. So take a supplement. It'll
be way way easier, way easier. For omega threes, you
could only find them in fish or in algae or krill.
So if you're vegan, you want to take some supplements
made from algae. Now I still supplemented with extra omega
threenes and extra colin, just because I wanted to put

(25:55):
as much as I could there. But supplements are great.
But again, like if you're supplementing, the molecules are still
going to be a bit less well absorbed than if
you take the real food.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
Is there any way of knowing whether all of what
you did has helped your son?

Speaker 1 (26:10):
I mean he's wonderful. He's very smart, super awake like ivey,
which means like just you know, he's really present. Is
there any way I could know?

Speaker 2 (26:21):
I don't think there's nothing right now that you can
test or know from to know that it's had a
positive impact.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
Well, in the studies, they can test this. For example,
they take two groups of moms. One group they supplement
with coline and the other group with a bit less collin.
What they do is they measure the kid's reaction time
on these computer tests in the first year of life.
And the reason scientists do this test is because it
correlates to adult IQ and they see that babies developing

(26:50):
in the room with more coline have faster reaction times
on that test, meaning they probably are going to have
higher adult IQ. But me personally, there's nothing I can
do because I'm not designing a perfect experiment. I didn't
clone myself and say, Okay, Jesse A is going to
do this diet, Jesse B this diet, same baby, and
we're going to see what happens. I have no idea,
and pregnancy is not everything.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Right.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
If my son decides all he's going to eat for
the rest of his life is natella and orange juice.
He's probably gonna get diabetes. So it is an important
window of calibration. But I don't know what's going to happen.
I just know that as his mom, I was lucky
enough to find this information, and I feel like I
did everything that I could to try to set him
up as well as I could.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, but I don't know. No, No, absolutely, of course,
And that's you always trying to do the best you
can do. What are the foods that mothers when they're
pregnant need to avoid, Well.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
I would say the classic ones. So alcohol is one.
There was some debate of shree years ago around oh,
maybe alcohol is not that bad. The thing is, when
you understand how the biology of it all works. If
you drink a glass of wine when you're pregnant and
your blood alcohol level goes up, your baby's that alcohol
level in your uterus also goes up by the same amount.

(28:05):
So when people say, oh, glass of wine is fine
during pregnancy, I'm like, when your baby is born, would
you give him red wine in his bottle? No, you're
doing the same thing.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
That's crazy. That's crazy and what impact does that have.

Speaker 1 (28:16):
Well, we know that very high alcohol levels can lead
to proper, proper, proper health conditions with babies born with
a lot of disability. But the one glass a day,
we don't really know. It seems to be fine, but
what's happening in the brain, we're not sure. In animal
studies they show that even the equivalent of one glass
a day needs the brain forming differently than it should.

(28:36):
So that's one thing. Another thing to avoid. I mean cigarettes,
all drugs, toxic chemicals if you can, because again they
go into your baby's bloodstream.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
What kind of toxic chemicals the ones we don't think about,
the ones that you had to really clear out.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
That's a good question. I think the big ones is
like asbestos, mold cleaning particides, so there's no stuff on those.
But yeah, probably it's a good idea. I try to
clean everything with vinegar. Yeah, I either drink it or
acan with it. That's a good idea. I also was
very careful with plastics, so I was wearing invisilines, you know,
the teeth retainers, and I took them out during pregnancy

(29:14):
because I saw some studies that show that there's minuscule
amounts of plastic that can be leaching into your body,
so I thought might as well be safe. But again
this is very early stuff, so.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Even drinking from a plastic water bottle.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
I try to avoid that for myself. Also because the
microplastics you want to avoid heating plastic in the microwave.
We're eating out of a warm or hot plastic container,
plastic bottles or a big, big one, so I lose
it all the time. But I buy a nice aluminum
water bottle and then I lose it after for it
I have to buy another one, but I try to
drink out of those for sure. And then the big

(29:47):
one we don't think about is like sugar. That's something
that goes directly into your baby's boodstream that your baby
also has to deal with. So I did all this
work on glucose, right, Maybe we can go back to
that a little bit, because I think the parallels between
adults glucose levels and the baby are interesting. So glucose
is our body's favorite source of energy. All the cells

(30:09):
in our body use it for energy, so our fingers
to move, our hearts, to pump, our brains to think,
et cetera. And we give glucose by eating carbs, which
I explained starches like bread, pasta, ryoceed potatoes, or sugars
like apple juice and chocolate cake. We talked about this
in our preist episode. But if you give your body

(30:30):
too much glucose, you get what's called a glucose spike
and these are not good. And these are not good
because they increase inflammation and they lead to your body
needing to turn that glucose into fat to protect itself
from the high glucose levels. And then after the spike
comes the crash and lots of glucose spikes over time
can lead to many symptoms and consequences. So when you're

(30:52):
pregnant your baby, his blood stream and your blood stream
are pretty much connected. There's no filter. So when you
have a glucosepike, your baby inside your uterus also has
a glucose spike.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
And what's that training the baby's body to do?

Speaker 1 (31:11):
Well? It does exactly what you do, meaning it registers
inflammation and it also has to deal with the spike,
so it has to crush, yeah, and it has to
turn the glucose into fat to manage the spike. So
your baby's body as he's developing, is like, oh, glucose spike, Okay,
I'll take some glucose and I need, But the glucose
I don't need. I'm going to store it as fat.

(31:33):
And that's why we see that baby's fat mass at
birth is perfectly correlated to the mother's glucose levels. So
the higher your glucose levels during pregnancy, the more fat
mass your baby is born.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
The baby's really cute.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
So absolutely super cute, but if there's a lot of fat,
it's a sign that your baby had to deal with
a very high glucose environment when he was in your belly.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Are they taking energy away from other areas of growth
by having to process that.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
That's a great question. I don't know if they're taking
energy away. But the main thing that's going on is
that repeated glucose pikes is increasing inflammation.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
So it's setting them up for having in inflammatory body
long term.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
It's doing a few things. Yes. One thing, yes, second
thing is it's training their body that to put on
fat like put on fat, put on fat, put on fat,
so that you know how to store glucose away quickly.
And so in animals we see that high sugar diets
during pregnancy means that the babies have these switches activated
on the genes for storing fat, so they are set up.

(32:41):
They're calibrated to be really good at storing fat. And
we all have friends who eat the same diet as
another friend, but one friend puts on much more weight
than the other. And then the other thing that happens
Jay has to do with your baby's brain. And this
is an entire incredible universe. So, as I said, all
of your neurons are being built during pregnancy, and so
you have the neurons in your brain, pure, pure, lots

(33:02):
of neurons being created, two hundred and fifty thousand neurons
per minute during pregnancy. Okay, but that's not all in
your baby's brain. There's also another type of cell. And
these cells are called the microglia. They kind of look
like starfish. They're like hello, microglia, and they are sort
of your baby's rangers. They're in your baby's brain as

(33:25):
he's growing his brain, and they detect problems. They say, oh,
that neuron is not shaping out as it should. I'm
going to go grab it and destroy it. That neuron
is not connecting very well, or it looks a bit weird.
I'm going to go grab it and destroy it. So
the microglia, the little starfish patrols are pruning your baby's
neurons to eliminate all the damaged ones. Now, the problem

(33:45):
is when we have high inflammation levels in a baby's
body do one of the causes can be the high
glucose levels. These microglia they kind of freak out and
they become overactive, so they start pruning neurons that should
not be pruned. So they're killing healthy neurons. They're making mistakes,

(34:06):
they're going a bit too far in their role, so
the brain is not being shaped as optimally as it could.
And scientists believe that this is why moms who have
gestational diabetes have kids at a twenty five percent higher
risk of developing autism, because is an association. Yeah, it's terrifying.

(34:31):
So it's an association. And it's actually not just autism,
but all psychiatric disorders are more common in babies of
moms who have distational diabetes, and again, scientists believe it
has to do with these overacting mioveractive microglia in the brain.
I want to be cautious here because it's pretty heavy stuck.
So what we're talking about here is an association. We're

(34:55):
not saying gestational diabetes causes autism, and still the numbers
are very low. For example, you go from three and
one hundred kids having autism in the general population to
four and one hundred kids having autism in moms who've
had gitational diabetes. It's an association. The numbers are still low,
but the signal is very strong. This is from studies

(35:15):
done on tens of millions of moms. This association remains.
So listen, it's a very you know, psychiatric disorder. It's
very big topic, lots of variables, lots of factors, but
it seems that perhaps high inflammation during pregnancy could be
one of many factors that is relevant in this quest

(35:36):
to try to understand these disorders. So again, it's just
shocking all the stuff that science knows, and it's shocking
how little parents are told.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, yeah, it's and it's hard because the way I'm
listening to him, like it feels like so much pressure
on the mom, Like all of this feels like and
you've just been through the process yourself, Like it's hard
work because you're almost testing your discipline and your willpower
at a time when you're trying to co create a baby,

(36:06):
which you've never done before. If it's your first time
doing it, it's your second time. Sure you've had some experience,
but it feels like so much, and it feels like
the stress of it. And I think we're kind of
like this in society like today we have in the past,
we didn't have information. Today we have information, and sometimes
more information creates more stress, and then we all get
to this place where we're like, oh, I'm just gonna
do what I can because I can't handle this. But

(36:28):
this has real as you say in this book, these
nine months count forever, like this has a lifetime impact.
So in one sense, we can't be as Okay, I'll
do my best because we know what it takes. How
do you encourage moms to think about the stress component
of this or which I'm sure you had to navigate yourself. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
I think the first thing we need to understand this
is not the mom's fault. Society has excused my own
language up. The food that is available today, the food
that is cheap, the food that's at the grocery store,
the food that they serve you even at the hospital
is bad for us, and it's leading to all sorts
of stuff from heart disease to diabetes. I mean, we're

(37:08):
all sick because of our food system. And it's also
failing pregnant moms, like it's failing everybody else. And so,
just like with everything else, we have to say, shit,
we are in a bad situation. Food around us is
not helping us. What can I do? What are small
things I can do to try to put the odds
back in my favor. And just like with my glucose hacks,
I teach people how to you know, reverse diabetes for example. Here,

(37:30):
I'm like, okay, ladies, we're in a bad situation. Society
is not helping us. Here are simple things that we
can do to help us navigate this food landscape during
pregnancy and Jay, it is a lot of pressure, like
you're building a human and I'm never going to be
able to take that pressure away. I felt it too,
But I'm hoping that with this book, I'm going to

(37:51):
lead moms away from like the overwhelming Instagram information and
that barrage of like stuff and be like, these are
four things that if you do them, you're going to
have an outsized positive effect on your baby's development and
long term health.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
It's yeah, it's stressful.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
It's so stressful to be pregnant because no matter what
you do, and even now that I have my baby
who's born, I feel like, no matter what I do,
I could have done it better. I'm gonna feel guilty
of this, guilty of that. Like it's tough. It's tough.
But if we go back to science and we go
back to simple stuff that has a big impact, I
truly believe we can navigate that pressure with a bit

(38:27):
more ease and serenity.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
And I appreciate you saying it's not, you know, the
woman's fault, because.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Biologically, jay babies are developing in female bodies and that's
just biology. But everybody is responsible for the society we
live in. We're not going to hold moms responsible for
the food at the grocery store, you see what I mean.
So it's just like this is a biological thing and
society as a whole is failing. Governments need to be

(38:53):
reading this, We need to be teaching this in medical school,
like doctors need to be talking about this. For example,
Collin that ninety percent of moms are not getting enough.
In the United States, only six percent of healthcare practitioners
talk about colling to pregnant moms. The surveys show this.
So the system is broken and it's it's so not

(39:15):
the mom's fault. It's a systematic issue and we need
to find a way.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, your doctor is not telling you you get to
the grocery store, it's not available. Obviously you don't know
that from your parents. You're left in a really, really
difficult position. I know. I mean, is there also a
connection between and I'm asking because I genuinely don't know,
is there a connection between diet and miscarriage?

Speaker 1 (39:39):
So for a few core things, So folic acid is one,
So that's why doctors will always tell you to take
a folic acid supplement because if you have very low levels,
then miscarriage is more likely. But colin is also associated
with miscarriage when it's too low, and that's something people
don't talk about. And listen, I was eating colin, I
was taking my foll the gast settlement, and I still

(40:02):
had a miscarriage. So you can do your best, but
some things are completely out of your control, for sure.
For sure, and the flip side of that is that
even if you do nothing that's in this book, even
if you've had kids before, they're probably going to be Okay.
We're talking about small optimizations. We're talking about as you saw,
like three percent to four percent small stuff. I'm fine,

(40:25):
you're fine, You're fine. Our moms didn't eat any colin
omega threes a lot of sugar were Okay. Humans are resilient.
But if we know this, we need to tell people
about it.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, And I think it's also as you grow older,
you actually start to realize how much all these things
matter more when it comes to long term health, like
the vulnerability you mean, yeah, like mental health, Like you
don't realize this in your twenties or when your kids
are teenager, when you know your body's doing all the
best work. But when you hit your forties and your
fifties and people go on, that's when you start to notice, Oh,

(40:57):
I've had information in my body for years, but with
mental health conditions that are based on that. When you
look at all the impacts, like I appreciate what you're
saying that humans of resilient will survive, but the reality
also is that you start to see the vulnerabilities and
the cracks and the body in the mind as we
get older that you don't appreciate when your kid's young
and everything generally hopefully feels healthy and touched with. I

(41:19):
really appreciate you sharing your own experience because I'd say
pretty much like seventy five percent of my friends who've
tried to conceive in the last twenty four months have
experienced at least one miscarriage, if not more. And I
feel like it's an area that isn't talked about enough.
It isn't shared enough unless you really are really close

(41:39):
friends with quite a lot of people, and there seems
to be at least some pain, and maybe there's even
guilt and shame attached to it. For many mothers that
I've spoken to, talk to me about the fact that
you thought you were doing everything right and then you
go through that. What is that experience like?

Speaker 1 (41:55):
So I'll take you back to the beginning, so I'll
tell the whole story. So and I decided to try
to have a baby. This was two years ago something,
and I got pregnant really quickly in two months, and
I had no cares in the world. I was just
very nauseous, but I thought I would think it would
be fine. So we go to the first ultrasound and
they find a heartbeat. I'm like, oh my god, great,

(42:17):
my baby's going to be born in December. How wonderful.
Oh man, we've got to move now, you get into
the process. I go back at the three month mark
for the next ultrasound to check everything's fine. And I
get to the doctor's office and I lay down and
they put this gel on your belly, and then they
put this weird wand thing to see inside your belly,

(42:38):
and there's there was a screen in front of me
that showed me the image in real time of what
he was seeing. So he put the thing on my belly,
turn the machine on. The image popped up on the screen,
and I just I just knew instantly that there was
a big problem. The embryo on the image had not grown,
and it was this is kind of a crude image,

(42:58):
but it was sort of laying at the bottom of
my uterus, a little bit like you would see a
dead fish at the bottom of an aquarium. Like I
could see that it was lifeless, and just this the
ground was ripped out of under my feet. Now I
was like, oh, my God, the embryo is dead. I
had experience what was called a silent miscarriage, silent being

(43:20):
the keyword here, meaning I had no symptoms. Most people
when they have a miscarriage, they start bleeding, they have crams,
and the body expulses the embryo. I had no symptoms.
I had been walking around for a month with a
dead embryo because they can see when it stopped developing,
and I had no clue, no idea. It was so

(43:42):
freaking painful. So I needed to have a surgery where
they take the embryo out, which was terrible in it
brought back all this trauma of my back. Surgery was
just so bad, and then I just spiraled and I
think I saw you like two weeks after, and I
was like, Jay, I'm really not okay. And I felt
like if emotions could kill me, i'd be dead. That's

(44:04):
the intensity I was feeling. Because it's not just like
you lost their pregnancy. Is you lost the entire narrative.
You lost the life that you had projected and planned.
All of a sudden, Oh, in December, I'm not going
to have a baby. It's so rough, And I was
so scared. Am I going to be able to get
pregnant again? Is this gonna happen again? All of a sudden,
all my friends were pregnant around me, and they were fine.

(44:25):
You know, It's just like, all of a sudden, everybody
was pregnant on Instagram. I felt so so so sad,
and I felt so angry, and I didn't understand why
it had it happened to me. I was like, why me?
And then I started talking to my friends and family.
I found out that my mom had had mischaracters, and
she had never told me, my stepmom, my grandmother, my
closest friend. All of a sudden, the tongue's untied. But

(44:48):
because I didn't know about these stories beforehand, I was
not prepared. I had no clue that this could happen
to me. Therefore, I fell from so so high. I
even told people I was pregnant. The I got the
positive pregnancy test. Usually you wait until three months because
that's when you know it's probably gonna be okay. I
was like, oh, I got pregnancy test positive. I called

(45:10):
up everybody, Am I gotta having a baby? I had
no conception and am somebody? I consider myself pretty well informed,
But yet I was. I was so lost, and then
the grief was so deep and so painful. But yet
at the same time, I wanted to try getting pregnant again,
and I was asking myself, do I have to have

(45:33):
fully grieved this pregnancy before I allow myself to have
another pregnancy. And then I realized that that grief was
always going to be there and coexist. I was never
going to be able to completely say goodbye to it.
So we tried again. I got pregnant again, and then
followed the most stressful mind months of my life because

(45:54):
every day I thought maybe there's a problem, and I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
You wake up with that feeling. It's the worst.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Because for the first four or five months, you don't
feel the baby. So I was just spiraling. I went
to the doctor so many times. I was so embarrassed.
I wanted so many ultrasounds that I started seeing two
different doctors and they didn't know about each other. Because
I felt so embarrassed of how much I wanted to
get I got like ten ultrasounds in the first three
months four months ten usually you get like two. So anyway,

(46:23):
it was terrible and it was really, really, really painful.
And then when my son was born. I felt like
I wasn't acts anymore because I was like, okay, easier,
he's alive, He's okay. But it was an awful experience,
and I wish that more people had told me about
their own miscarriages so that I felt a bit less alone.
I would even find I would go and google and
be like celebrities, we have had miscarriages, and I saw, oh,

(46:46):
Beyonce had a miscarriage. Okay, I feel less alone.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Now.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
That's how much I wanted connection. That's how lost I felt.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, Gabrielle Unions talked about it at Lant Experiences of
Multiple and did just yeah, it's uh gosh. I mean
it's you know, it's one of those things that it
doesn't matter how even how common it is. It's like
the loss and the grieving and the experience of it
is so heavy.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
And few people know how to hold space for it.
Talk to me about that, you're grieving, You're properly grieving,
and I think it's one of the only griefs that
people don't know how to manage. Usually when grief comes
up in life, we kind of know what to do.
We check in with the person, we say you're okay,
do you want me to come over with miscarriage grief?
It feels different because it's invisible, nobody physical diet, And

(47:36):
so I got a range of responses from people saying, oh,
it's just nature, drink, it's things, don't worry to people
saying like okay, well just move on and you know
it'll work next time. It was like, you don't understand,
it's not about that, And then there were amazing people
who also just knew to just hold it. But it
makes it makes a lot of us very uncomfortable because
we don't know how to handle it and all you really,

(47:58):
all I really wanted was just people to say, I'm
so sorry, this must be so hard. Yeah, can I
bring you a chocolate cake? That's all I wanted. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
So it's just like it's just like any emotion. Do
you want it to be held better? But we're not educated.
I mean, you do great work to help people know
how to how to deal this with emotion and hold it,
but yeah, it's it's rough.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, it's shocking to me that people even still think
they can say things like oh well just move on
and work out, and I get it. It's coming from
a good.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
They want to be positive totally.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
It's coming from a good place. But it's like, I
think we're so far past the thinking that positive out
pace is like a difficult emotion and that you can't
just put a band aid on it and be happy
about it. And and also just I think I love
what you said. It's it's giving people space to tell
you how they feel and what's going on and that

(48:52):
it is hard. And if they say it isn't, then
that's okay too. But it's it's letting people tell you
their story. That's all you can do. You can't you
going to solve it or fix it. And I think
that's where it comes from. It's like we want to
fix it. We want to solve it because it's almost
uncomfortable for us to sit there with them. Yeah, and
I really am happy that you shared it because I'm

(49:12):
hoping that a lot more people who listen to this
will also look to you and go wow, Like Jesse,
he was doing everything right and still this experience happened.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
That's the thing. I was doing everything that I knew of.
I was taking the supplements, I was eating the eggs,
I was doing all the stuff I wasn't doing any
of the harmful things we know could impact the baby.
I was not bungee jumping, I was not drinking vodka.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
You know, is there any research to suggest what causes
a miscarriage? Does anything exist?

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Yeah, so you kind of see these pi sharts that
show you the percentage likelihood. So maybe it's an nutritional
deficiency like Folly to Colling. Maybe it's a chromosomal abnormality,
meaning that the chromosomes in the sperm and the egg
were slightly messed up. And as you age, your eggs
and your sperm have more abnormalities, which is why miscarriages

(50:00):
or common as you advance an age. So maybe my
egg had a chromosome that was missing or a problem.
Maybe my husband's sperm had a problem in his chromosomes.
We don't know, but in a way it's quote unquote
good because a miscarriage means that embryo was probably not viable.
Other reasons could be your placenta, which is the organ

(50:25):
that helps grow the baby. Maybe there was an issue there.
Maybe your body was not able to hold onto their pregnancy.
And it's probably a lot of stuff that we don't
even know about, but in most cases, you can't control it,
and so that's why it's it's stressful.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I can't imagine it.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
I mean, you have to hold it lightly, you know.
And my therapist said something amazing. So when I was
pregnant with my son, so my second pregnancy, and I
was like four months in and I was still super stressed.
I was like, well, what if I miss Carab what
if I lose him? And she was like, you don't
know how long you're going to have this baby, but
for as long as you have him, you can choose

(51:07):
to love him. Because I was even keeping myself from
love and from George during my second pregnancy until like
the fifth month mark because I was so anxious. I
didn't want to reopen my heart because I was so scared.
And after she said that, I was like, Okay, you
know what, Yes I can allow myself to love and

(51:29):
love is vulnerable. But I'm glad I did. But it
was hard. Yeah, that's very hard. And we waited six
months to tell our friends and family. That's how stress
we were. Six months.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
It's real. It's like one thing is going through a
health problem on your own, and it's a whole nother thing.

(52:01):
When you're taking care of someone else, and it's yeah,
I've seen my friends go through it, and thankfully a
lot of them have also had babies on their second
or third time round, and but yeah, I've seen it.
Just how hard it is for the couple too. And
we've been talking about the loss of you know, the
grieving that you're going through, the loss of the baby
or the life you were going to have, but even

(52:22):
how it affects the husband and wife or the boyfriend,
girl from partners, whatever it may be. Just that's heavy too,
totally and it's not easy. Another thing you raises challenges
for moms in their nine months is fatigue. And you know,
we've been talking about stress somewhat and that's how we
went off in this direction. But that fatigue that you

(52:44):
get by being pregnant, and that naturally wants you to
have sugar and then naturally wants you to have cobs
and like all the stuff that we're so like, what
do you do when you're tired?

Speaker 1 (52:55):
Well, I totally get it. I was there too. And
what's interesting about the sugar is that you think it's
giving you energy, it's actually not. It's giving you dopamine.
Dopamine is the pleasure molecule in your brain, so you
feel kind of awake, like whoa, I'm awake. You think
it's energy. It's not. But it's okay because sugar helps
us feel better. And I totally am there. I was

(53:15):
there too. So what I did is I always made
sure to not have sugar on an empty stomach. Why
because this is going to create a big spike and
a big drop and more fatigue, and it's going to
create a big spike that's also going to go into
my baby's betstream. So always sugar after a meal, never
for breakfast, for example. And if I felt sometimes I

(53:36):
felt really really hungry, like I was just like, well,
I need to eat so much today, and that was
probably my body telling me you need more food. So
I would eat spaghetti. I would eat all the carbs
I wanted. But again I would do that in certain ways.
So for example, I would always have the carbs after
a veggie starter built around vegetables, because the fiber in
the veggies creates this protection in your intestine and it

(53:58):
slows down how quickly gluca arrives into your bloodstream. So
I was like, I'm going to eat the carbs that
I'm craving, but with the hacks so that I reduce
spikes and inflammation in my body and in my baby's body.
And all this is in the chapter in nine Months
Account Forever about blood, sugar and glucose. And you can
use all of the hacks around my glucose work except one,

(54:20):
which is vinegar. So if you do want to do
the vinegar hack during pregnancy, you have to make sure
that it's pasteurized because you want to make sure that
it's safe to consume for you and your baby. And
the hack is the following. You take one tablespoon of
vinegar in a big glass of water before you eat carbs,
and this can reduce to glucose spike by up to
thirty percent.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
Yes, this is your your magic formula.

Speaker 1 (54:42):
And the thing is here. What it does, It just
slows down how quickly glucose arrives in your bloodstream because
it slows down the digestion of the carbs. So it's
not erasing the carbs. It's fine to have carbs, and
as I mentioned, your baby needs more carbs as pregnancy progresses,
but it's helping them arrive more calmly bloodstream like not
so brucely, and that's the whole point. We want to

(55:04):
have the carbs beloved with less spike, so less inflammation,
and less drop so less fatigue and more cravings. Yes,
it's all about like working with the cravings.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
You know, any other hacks that we have to know
that women listening need to.

Speaker 1 (55:16):
Know, Well, if you feel like moving, even just going
for a quick walk can be super helpful. Not only
does it help with your blood sugar levels.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
But I still walk for ten minutes after eating dinner
every nice that's amazing.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
But during pregnancy, exercise seems to be doing something incredible.
So this is one of my favorite studies. Okay that
I discovered pregnancy. So scientists took two groups of rats.
Both groups were pregnant, and they put them in the
same house as same diet, same lighting, everything. The only
difference was one group of rats had these tiny little

(55:51):
treadmills and they had to walk on the treadmill for
thirty minutes a day every day doing their pregnancy. The
other group did not do any exercise. That was the
only difference. Then the babies were born and the scientists
put the babies in these mazes and they measured the
baby's anxiety levels. They found that the babies from the
moms who exercised solved the mazes twice as fast, Wow,

(56:16):
and had eighty percent fewer anxiety symptoms. No way, the
only difference was the physical activity during pregnancy.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
So even if you just walk, it's going to help
your glucose levels and gonna help probably your baby's brain development.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
There's ten thousand steps.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
I mean, when you're pregnant, one step feels like ten
thousand steps. So do what you can. Oh, do what
you can. I loved walking. I was personally. I went
and weightlifted at the gym until like my eight and
a half month of pregnancy, and it was very hard,
but it felt good after I was done. That's the
only thing I could do all day. I was like, Okay,

(56:54):
I'm going to the gym today, and I would just
muster up all my courage with my big belly. And
I was living in Montmarch and Peris, which is very
on top of this hill, and I was living in
this apartment which was a fifth story walk up.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Oh my god. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
So I moved when I was eight months, but before then,
I just naturally was in a situation to walk all
the time. Yeah, so do what you can even if
you can't move. One of my favorite hacks is the
calf raise hack. So you put your feet on the
ground like this and you do some calf phraises. So
you do like push ups with your with your shins,
with your calves. This is very powerful. I'm reducing a

(57:28):
gluco spike after meal and also counts as exercise.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
To solve it twice as quick and have that much
less anxiety. That's huge.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
And listen, this isn't rats. Do we know if it's
happening in humans. We don't know. We just know the
exercise is very good during pregnancy, and babies of moms
who are exercise tend to have better emotional regulation. But
we haven't done a study being like, okay, two groups
of moms, samehouse, same die, same lighting, one tread not.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
We can't do that.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Yeah, we can do that, but animal studies are really
really helpful.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Yeah, what do pregnant moms do if they're experiencing a
lot of bloating?

Speaker 1 (58:01):
Hmm, that's a very good question. I think some of
the bloating is hormonal, especially in the first trimester, and
then probably similar stuff as you would do the rest
of the time. So counterintuitively, you actually want to have
more fiber. Sometimes if you increase fiber very quickly, it's
going to lead to a lot of bloating, so you
want to make sure you're doing that slowly, and then honesty.

(58:23):
Sugars is a big one, So if you reduce your
sugar intake, generally bloating goes down. And sometimes you have
food sensitivities that can increase bloating also, But that's a
big topic.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, one thing we haven't talked about before we get
into a game we made for you. Yeah, one thing
we haven't talked about is how does the man's diet
affect his sperm and effect. You know, we touched on
it briefly when we're talking about discourages, but like, how

(58:53):
important is that? How valuable is that?

Speaker 1 (58:55):
So the man's diet before conception is going to set
up his sperm qual for sure. We know that the
problem is from the moment conception happens. The entire responsibility
of the diet is in the female body. For example,
so women have these eggs, right, and the sperm meets
the egg. The sperm only brings DNA, he's not bringing

(59:17):
anything else. The egg is ten thousand times bigger than
the sperm because it contains DNA and also food. So
the mom's diet is more important to the development than
the dad's diets. The dad's diet is important preconceptions. For example,
my husband three months before trying to get pregnant. Both
times he cut out alcohol, He was exercising a lot,

(59:40):
he was really careful with his sugar. He did all
of that, and then he kind of threw me the
ball and I was in charge. But it is helpful
for the dad to have a healthy lifestyle, especially preconception.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Yeah, it's just I feel like none of this has
ever talked about, Like we almost like just have kids
without thinking about it, and this.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
It works, right, Like it works. But if in a
world where we have all these incredible scientific studies we
need to know about them.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
It works. But I also think we're noticing long term
the ramifications of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Let me make you a little list of my problems.
So I have an unhealthy obsession with cats. You know,
I have existential crises all the time, lots of mental
health issues, deepersonalization, dissociation, anxiety, depression, cusp of pre diabetes
when I was twenty five, Like I was two points
away from pre diabetes. Problems with emotional regulation, like emotions

(01:00:33):
can really overwhelm me. I am really bad at running fast.
I mean, the list goes on. Okay, some of these things,
maybe they're genetic. Some of these things maybe they have
to do with my mom's diet in the room, Maybe
they have to do with my child child experiences like
who knows, but for sure, the nine months of pregnancy
calibrate things their window of outsized influence. And so today

(01:00:57):
I'm after knowing about all the science, I'm certain that
my mom's diet if it had been slightly more higher
in calling omega three is protein and lore and sugar,
I'm sure that it would feel different today.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Yeah, and those are all doable, they're practical. Exactly, that
makes sense. And add on a couple of hacks that
you just mentioned.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
So what's wrong with you now, let's make it this
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yeah, I'm like, I've got plenty as well. I've got
plenty of good stuff too, So I'm trying to think
about like what my mom would have done right with
like and then of course there's so much nurture. But
there is what is fascinating is when I talk to
my friends who have kids. Of course I'm only talking
to people I don't have kids. When I talk to
my friends who have kids, they're like, oh my god,
that kid came out completely different to the other one.

(01:01:38):
Like kids have personalities, kids have their own way of being,
they have their own aura and life, and so there
is so much that's being affected by how they're created,
because all babies don't just come out all the same
as well.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Absolutely, and then depending on your diet, you will program
your kids differently. Yeah, if you have a different diet
during two pregnancies, your baby's epigenetics probably different. And then
of course you have whatever you want to call the
soul or what it is. And then you have how
you grow up. You have your experiences, they shape you.
Everything is important.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
What's the study that hasn't been done that you'd wish
we could do to understand pregnancy better?

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
It would be very unethical. If we really wanted to
measure the impact, we would recruit one thousand women, and
half of them we would say, eat what you normally
were going to eat, don't worry about it, and the
other half. We would make sure that they're getting all
the nutrients to talk about in this book, and we
would sub them in them and give them all the colon,

(01:02:36):
all the protein, all the OGA threes. We would make
sure that they're below the WHO recommendation for sugar. And
then the babies come out. Then we would follow them
for thirty forty fifty years and we would see what happened. Actually,
while this is impossible, something happened in the UK that
was kind of close. Do you know about this?

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Okay, So from nineteen forty to nineteen fifty three in
the UK there was a sugar ration. The government reduced
the amount of sugar that everybody could eat on a
daily basis. People had a ration, an allowance. Everybody had
forty grams of sugar allowed per day. This was during
the war and it was a way to manage resources.

(01:03:14):
So everybody got ten sugar cubes a day. That's it. Moms, grandparents,
pregnant moms, everybody forty grams of sugar py day. This
lasted thirteen years. Then all of a sudden the ration
was lifted. People went back to eating what they usually ate,
which meant eighty grams of sugar per day. So all
of a sudden, everybody in the UK went from forty

(01:03:35):
grams to eighty grams of sugar per day. And scientists
in the early two thousands were like, ah, this is
really interesting because this means that we have babies who
were developing when pregnant moms ate forty grams of sugar,
and then just after we have babies developing when moms
were eating eighty grams of sugar during pregnancy. And the
scientists wondered if they could see any differences in the

(01:03:56):
baby's health because the only thing that had changed was
the amount of sugar. So they called up they found
the medical records, and they called sixty thousand people, and
they saw that the babies who were developing when sugar
was lower had a fifteen percent lower likelihood of having
developed type of diabetes in their lifetime compared to their
peers who were developing and born after the sugar ration,

(01:04:19):
who had a higher likelihood of diabetes. So what does
this mean. It means that reducing or sugar intake during
pregnancy is associated with lifelong benefit less vulnerability to diabetes,
lifelong in your baby for their entire life, and the
only change was the number of sugar cubes per day.

(01:04:39):
Isn't that amazing? Today most moms eate eighty grams of
sugar per day, which is the level that was shown
to have higher diabetes risk. The WHO recommends twenty five grams,
which is lower than the sugar ration. So even if
you just look at your diet during pregnancy, you're like, Okay,
I'm going to try to just reduce my even five
grams ten grams one sugar. Instead of having an orange juice,

(01:05:01):
I'm going to have a whole orange that's twenty grams
of sugar gone. Just these small tweaks can have an
outsized impact on your baby's vulnerability to disease.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
Yeah, that's unbelievable. I mean, that's so useful, so useful,
so useful to be able to pull on that, And
you've done so much, honestly to help us understand sugar
better and even in pregnancy. I feel like that's such
a big important marker. Jesse, we came up with a
This or That Game for you pregnancy edition.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
Okay, I love it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
This was inspired by your book Nine Months That Count Forever,
and so it's dedicated to your and your book. So
Jesse this or that because you did the final five
last time. So question number one cobs first or protein
first when you're nauseous.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Oh, protein first, Protein all the time. It will help
a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Okay, small frequent snacks or fewer, more balanced meals.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
Earth if you're very nauseoust, the small frequent ones really
really helps. I was eating an almond every five minutes basically,
But ideally it's always going to be better to have
bigger meals. But also as you get more pregnant. As
pregnancy progresses, your stomach gets smaller, so because your uterus
is pushing on it, so you have to eat smaller meals.
So it's not a huge deal. Just make sure that

(01:06:12):
you're eating the right stuff like the protein and the
fish and the eggs.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
Very useful, good advice, all right, morning sickness the entire pregnancy,
or intense cravings.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Like would I prefer?

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Yeah, cravings pushing through nausea to eat for nutrients, or
meeting your body where it is.

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
Oh, come on, that's easier meeting your body where it is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
We're just checking, you know. We like trying to help
everyone else. Following strict pregnancy food rules, or reducing stress
around food.

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
Mmmmm, reducing stress around food and knowing that by doing
these four key things, you're helping your baby a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
More rest or gentle daily movement.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
Oooh both if you can.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
Strength training or cardio during pregnancy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Ooh, great question. Whatever you do, whatever you can do. Okay, yeah,
both are great. So do the one that you can do.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
And you you said you're doing weight training. That was
eating within an hour of waking or waiting until appetite
kicks in.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
Depends on the na very nauseous. You gotta eat immediately.
Otherwise listen to your body's cues.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
I can't believe there's no solve to the nausea.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
I can't believe.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
There's not a lot of budget and that women's health,
you know, guys.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
To figure that out. That sounds so uncomfortable. Cold foods
or warm foods when nausea hits.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
M I never thought about that. Whatever you can stomach.
There's no science on that note it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
Energy peaks at three am or fatigue peaks at three pm.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Oh man, Oh, if I had to choose one, I
think for t at three pm if I don't have
to work, so I could have a little nap. I
started napping when I was pregnant. That was the new thing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
Nice feel like a human calculator for cabs all day.
Will completely forget nutrition exists?

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
Oh my god. Well if I completely forgot what nutrition,
that nutrition existed, No, I could not do that. I don't.
I also don't want to be a calculator and be upset. Okay,
pass joker.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Okay, and okay. Two more prior toize stable glucose in
the first trimester when nausea hits, or the third trimester
when energy drops.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
Third trimester. I think it in terms of like the
baby's brain development. It said it's peak in the third trimester.
The first trimester is also important. Organs are developing, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
Talk to me about that. Actually, talk to me about
what's happening in the first three months, the second three months,
and the time.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
So the main difference is that in the first trimester,
your blood stream and your baby's blood stream are not
yet connected, so your baby is relying on this kind
of milk that your uterus produces for energy nutrients. In
the second trimester, the plus centa comes into play and
connects your blood stream and your baby's blood stream. At
that point, it's like a symbiosis is established and your

(01:09:03):
blood and your baby's blood are exchanging nutrients in waste
at all times, so from that point on you're more connected. Now, yes,
first trimester is important, lots of stuff is happening, but truly,
if you look at nutrients, and especially in terms of
the amount of nutrients you're going to need, how much choline,
how much protein, how much omega free is it's the

(01:09:24):
second and third trimester that are really key to make
sure you're getting enough. And it's also the second and
third trimester where usually you're not nauseous, so it's easier
to make the right choices.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Amazing, very cool, great advice. All right, last one, what's worse?
Skipping meals or eating sugar without protein?

Speaker 1 (01:09:43):
Oh my god, what's worse? I don't think skipping meals
is bad if you're not hungry. Okay, if you're not hungry,
you don't have to force yourself, but this goes for everybody.
If you do skip a meal, though, make sure that
the next time you eat you're eating protein fa fiber first,
because your stomach is going to be very empty, so
very sensitive. So I would say worse is eating sugar

(01:10:03):
without pertin, but also if you have sugar without protein,
it's also fine. These are hard.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
These were hard, hard, Yeah, these are Honestly though, Jesse,
I want to say that you know you're writing this
book nine months that count Forever, how your pregnancy diet
shapes your baby's future. When I first I think when
you first sent me the cover through, or you first
told me about the name, I'd never thought about it
like that, and it sounds so ridiculous to say that,

(01:10:29):
but I never really realized. I was like, yeah, it
is nine months that counts forever, and I was like wow,
like that that sentence in and of itself is just
so powerful and so emphatic because you don't think about
it like that. You think you have the kid's whole
life to do stuff, and you do. But these nine
months are having such a big impact. The fact that
you've been able to simplify it as always in the

(01:10:51):
best way that only you know how to do, to
four core things that we can all work on and
think about. I'm so grateful to you, truly. I know
that I'm going to recommend this to every single of
my friends who is trying to have a baby, thinking
about having a baby. Don't worry. I won't give it
to friends who are not thinking about it. Don't know.
But genuinely, I think it's incredible to have a guide

(01:11:11):
that is so dedicated to this very specific challenge that,
like you said, it's no one's fault and no one
is responsible for apart from the food system's governments and
everyone around of us. So thank you for doing the
hard work. Yes, I really mean that. I really mean that.
It's very rare that you have a book that you're like, oh,
I know exactly when to give this to someone, and

(01:11:33):
everyone who's listening and watching, I hope this is the
book that you're buying for friends, family members, nieces, nephews, cousins,
you know, whoever it may be, because yeah, it's going
to change every child's life. So thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
Thank you j for in writing me back. I love
our conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
Two is great to have you back with the best.
Thanks Jess.

Speaker 3 (01:11:53):
If you enjoyed this podcast, you're going to love my
conversation with Michelle Obama where she opens up on how
to stay with your partner when they're changing. If you're
going through something right now with your partner, This is
the episode for you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:07):
The world won't always like you, but you can't count
on the world to like you.

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