The Kind Mama: A Simple Guide to Supercharged Fertility, a Radiant Pregnancy, a Sweeter Birth, and a Healthier, More Beautiful Beginning

Praise for The Kind Mama

A unique and positive statement about how wonderfully well pre-birth, pregnancy, birth, and child raising can be experienced. Not only do you need this book, but I needed this book.

–From the foreword by Jay Gordon, MD, FAAP

Medically sound and engagingly written, this book will be on your bedside table as a trusted guide.

–Neal D. Barnard, MD, George Washington University School of Medicine; president, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Washington, DC

I LOVE this book! It’s chock-full of invaluable information for mamas, along with beautiful images. Kudos, Alicia Silverstone, for sharing your story and the personal choices you’ve made for your family. So inspiring!

–Ricki Lake, producer of The Business of Being Born

For Bear Blu

and all the babies yet to come into this world

Contents

Foreword by Jay Gordon, MD

Introduction: I Promise There’s a Better Way

Part I: Preparing Your Baby House: Getting Your Body Ready for a Beautiful Pregnancy and Birth

Chapter 1: Becoming a Kind Mama

Chapter 2: Let’s Get You Pregnant

Chapter 3: Transforming Your Body into a Clean, Mean, Baby-Making Machine

Chapter 4: Kicking the Nasty Stuff

Chapter 5: Blueprint for Baby: Adding More Kind

Part II: I’m Pregnant! Now What? A Trimester-by-Trimester Guide

Chapter 6: First Trimester

Chapter 7: The Case for Kind Birth

Chapter 8: Second Trimester

Chapter 9: Third Trimester and Birth

Chapter 10: The Kind Nursery

Part III: Welcoming Baby: Lying-In and Creating a Space to Heal

Chapter 11: Lying-In, aka Your Most Amazing Baby Vacation

Chapter 12: Breastfeeding

Chapter 13: Mastering Doodie Duty: The Diaper Solution

Part IV: Raising Baby: The First 6 Months and Beyond

Chapter 14: Kind Parenting: The Healthy, Happy Baby Plan

Chapter 15: The Family Bed

Chapter 16: The First 6 Months for Mama and Baby

Chapter 17: Baby’s First Food

Appendix I: Recipes

Appendix II:

Kind Food from A to Zinc

Your New No-Medicine Chest

Resources

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s wet and round and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

–Kurt Vonnegut

Foreword

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had conversations with Alicia Silverstone about pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and nutrition and I love her point of view on these topics—so I happily accepted her request to write this foreword. Frankly, I thought I would skim the manuscript to meet my deadline—it being my office’s busy season, though there aren’t a lot of unbusy seasons in pediatrics—and then I started reading . . . and couldn’t stop. And found I had no urge to skim or to skip chapters.

Not only do you need this book but I needed this book.

The Kind Mama is a unique positive statement about how wonderfully well prebirth, pregnancy, birth, and child raising can be experienced.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has accepted my dues for 30 years and I have remained a member in good standing for all that time. By that, I don’t mean to suggest that I have won awards from them, or that I’d win a pediatricians’ popularity contest for my opinions on breastfeeding, the family bed, childhood nutrition, or other matters. They do a pretty good job advocating for the members of the Academy—us pediatricians—but I have found that they are often lacking in strong advocacy for breastfeeding and other crucial children’s health issues.

I have also worked for 30 years with doctors of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. These docs have delivered most of the babies I’ve cared for throughout my career, although I have seen hundreds of babies born at home, too. Obstetricians may someday return to an evidence-based and research-based model for the practice of obstetrics and childbirth, but right now the C-section rate in America hovers around 33 percent. This is a huge increase from the less than 5 percent cesarean deliveries 50 years ago. Just consider that the World Health Organization (WHO) has suggested that for the best health of mothers, the Caesarean section rate should be about 10 to 15 percent.

By the way, this large number of surgical deliveries does not promote safer pregnancy outcomes: In 2010 the WHO’s official report on cesarean sections was published in the world’s most highly respected journal, The Lancet, and one of the study’s authors, Dr. A. Metin Gülmezoglu, said, The relative safety of the operation leads people to think it’s as safe as vaginal birth. That’s unlikely to be the case. The WHO Study also pointed to increased ICU admissions, transfusion, and later complications for women who underwent operative delivery that was not medically indicated. Other medical research has shown that babies delivered via C-section have more respiratory issues immediately following birth.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the United States ranked 50th in the world in rates of maternal death and 32nd in infant mortality. We earn this distinction in a nation that operated on one-third of pregnant women in 2013 and puts more babies in newborn intensive care units than any other country on the planet.

Mothers and fathers need to inform themselves before birth about hospital procedures and how to keep your newborn safe, unmedicated, and close to you. The Kind Mama offers the newest and best information I’ve ever seen. It covers everything from the natural approach to treating postpartum depression to babies’ varying poop schedules.

Carry this book with you when you interview pediatricians, who should be honored to care for your conscious, healthy, new family. And later, take The Kind Mama to each doctor’s visit. Vegan and vegetarian doctors are hard to find, so The Kind Mama’s nutritional guidance is a godsend to those of us who skip burgers, fries, and chocolate cereal in favor of fruits, vegetables, and beans and want to feed our babies and children that way, too. (To give you a feeling for the American Academy of Pediatrics’ approach to feeding moms and babies, please know that for years the chairwoman of the AAP’s Committee on Nutrition was also a paid consultant for the American Cattlemen’s Beef Association. You can imagine her opinion and her influence on the agency.)

The Kind Mama can help you create a nontoxic life for yourself before, during, and after delivery. Your best friends won’t be offended by your shower invitation or birth announcement telling them you respectfully request no plastic toys as gifts. In fact, they’ll be grateful for the insight—and the guidance.

Thank you, Alicia, for saving my babies and their parents.

Jay Gordon, MD, FAAP

January 20, 2014

Introduction

I Promise There’s a Better Way

When did making babies become so hard?

First there are the drugs and injections just to get pregnant; then what seems like the inevitable 9 months of being a bloated, hormonal bitch; topped off by a hectic delivery under bright lights while strapped to beeping machines. Not to mention the impending doom of having to deal with a screaming baby while feeling sick, tired, and helpless. Whatever happened to starting with sweet baby-making love, enjoying 9 months of glowing fertility-goddess joy, then giving birth with confidence and raising a baby with clarity? Well, listen up, ladies: It can be that way. Did you hear what I said?! Having a super-healthy, super-vibrant, soul-satisfying pregnancy, birth, and mamahood is a complete and total reality.

Whether you believe in God, the Divine Spirit, or Mother Nature, this fact remains the same: We have been blessed with everything we need to carry, birth, and care for a child. Full stop. What you and I are going to do is unlock this amazing potential. If you’re having trouble conceiving, I’ll do my best to get you knocked up. If you’re just starting to think about getting pregnant, we’ll talk about how to just let it flow—no crazy planning or calendar tracking required. If you’re already expecting—and have maybe hit a couple of bumps in the road—then I’ll show you the way to have a luminous, present, ailment-free pregnancy. And just when you think it can’t get any more gooey and delicious than having that little one in your belly, we’ll talk about how to get that scrumptious light of a baby into this world in the most gentle, beautiful way.

Oh, and while we’re at it, we’re going to help prevent or even cure your PMS, irregular periods, high blood pressure, insomnia, allergies, breakouts, weight struggles, thyroid condition, lupus, and multiple sclerosis—while significantly lowering your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. We’ll boost your immune system and unclutter your mind. You’ll have more energy, sleep better at night, maintain an ideal weight, and exude a glow that’s more than just hormonal frenzy. You’ll be able to listen to what your body really needs and then relax into the yumminess of it all.

This is not a book about the day-to-day affairs of your uterus. This book is a recipe for how to have a pregnancy, birth, and ever after free of fear, anxiety, and all the not-fun things that everyone says are unavoidable. I was inspired to follow this path because I watched some of my friends being pregnant, then birthing and raising their kids beautifully and easily and naturally. The choices I made regarding raising my own son, Bear Blu, came from witnessing the difference between their way and the normal way that didn’t feel so right to me.

I’ll share with you my choices and the choices that many women around the world are making so that you can find the path that feels best for you. This book will be a guiding hand to offer another way. I recommend you read this book all the way through first—then you can refer to each section as need be. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to set your intentions for a beautiful mamahood before the baby is born. In these pages, we’ll talk about all the things you might have been told—whether from friends, doctors, or family members—and why there may be better alternatives. We’ll help you create the best protective shield for fragile new life while tapping into your most grounded self. You’ll connect more deeply with your own needs, which means you’ll be more receptive to your baby’s. You’ll have a lot of questions along the way, and I’m here to help. But nature’s already provided the answers. All you have to do is get kind, tap in, and receive the gifts of the incredible road ahead.

Now, let’s go make a baby!

With love,

PART I

preparing your baby house:

Getting Your Body Ready for a Beautiful Pregnancy and Birth

1

Becoming a Kind Mama

Before we dive in, I’d first like to talk to all those ladies out there having trouble in the baby department. If it’s been a struggle getting pregnant, let’s focus on how we can turn what might feel like a curse into a blessing. I know that might be the last thing you want to hear after what may have been months or years of stressing about things like ovulation and endometrial lining, but if you’re still fertility challenged, then something has to change, right? Think of all the people who go through their entire lives never knowing what’s keeping them from reaching their full, glorious potential. Now you have the opportunity to feel your best, get happy, become centered, and try to do this nature’s way. It’s a gentler, easier, and certainly more fun path to becoming the mama you were meant to be.

Now, to all the pregos out there: Listen up. Believe me when I say that I hear you when you lament the aches and pains and tribulations of being pregnant. I know what almost everyone is telling you—that this time in your life will be a constant battle between you and your seemingly out-of-control body. But a radiant, buoyant, nourished, stress-free pregnancy is within your grasp. And we are going to get you there.

And guess what, everyone? The secret to a blissed-out pregnancy and mamahood is the same for all of you. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to get pregnant or have already conceived, are expecting your first baby or your fourth, or are giving birth in 9 months or 9 days—you are all on same journey, and it’s what I call becoming a Kind Mama.

We usually think of kindness in terms of how we treat others, and while that is always important, the kindness I’m calling for is—first and foremost—toward yourself. It’s not about being selfish; it’s about realizing that honoring your own wants and needs is the sweetest thing you can do. Because when you’re happy and healthy, it’s easier to be the best version of you. And most important, it’s how we’re going to bring your baby into the world in a healthier, happier way.

Being a Kind Mama is not only the key to building the ideal place for your baby to thrive and grow but also the secret to having a soulful, sexy pregnancy that’s liberated from digestive issues, bloating, swollen feet, insomnia, and all the other yucky things we think come automatically with carrying a small person inside of us. You’ll be protecting both you and your baby from a wide range of diseases as well as from pollutants and toxic influences that can cause nasty longterm effects. If your journey has been difficult up until now, then you’ll finally be able to shed all that manic energy surrounding baby making. You’ll be on your way toward having a pregnancy that’s magical and delightful—the kind that makes you envy other pregnant women after you’ve given birth because you can’t wait to do it all over again.

The good habits that you start here will make your journey through parenthood that much smoother. They’ll set you up to channel your inner-warrior strength for labor; heal more quickly after birth; make the most ambrosial breast milk elixir; bond more deeply with your baby; and set a healthy, wise example for your child. Sure, you’ll face challenging moments, but you’ll be able to glide right through them. Have I gotten less sleep in the past 2 years than I’d like? Definitely. Do I sometimes leave the house in yesterday’s pajamas? Often. But has being a Kind Mama been the most delicious, world-rocking undertaking in my time on this planet so far? Without a doubt.

Regardless of where you are in this adventure, know that from this moment forward, you have a choice—you can choose whether to feel amazing or to just be getting by. Take this opportunity to set the bar for how you want to live the rest of your life. I promise you’ll come out the other side feeling more incredible than you ever thought possible.

What you’ll find in the pages of this book is the wisdom I’ve taken to heart on my own path to Kind Mamahood. It’s a precious and potent stew of advice that comes from some of the smartest obstetricians, gurus, midwives, pediatricians, experts, healers, and friends I’ve been lucky enough to know. I’ve sifted through pages and pages of research, read stacks of books, looped in readers of my blog, and asked experts question after question to confirm what I know in the depth of my soul to be right. Clearly, it was too much to ask for one easy-to-follow resource that was as inspiring as it was informative! Believe me, if it were out there, I wouldn’t be writing it now—I’d be handing out a copy to everyone I know. So instead, I started thinking about all the amazing information and insight I was lucky enough to have at my fingertips. I thought about it during checkups, while out for walks, when figuring out how to stick it to ridiculous naysayers—I was even thinking about this book during labor! Now I get to pass it all on to you. So let’s get started!

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

—Virginia Woolf

2

Let’s Get You Pregnant

Your baby house is the special part of you that will shelter and nourish your baby for the first 9 months of his or her life. You can think of it as your uterus, sure, but it’s more than that. It includes your organs, intestines, veins, heart, blood, bones, and tissues, too. Because your body is like a little machine. All the parts work together to get you pregnant. They work together to keep you healthy. And the most genius thing of all is that this machine knows how to fix itself when something’s broken. That’s what’s so brilliant—your body wants to be healthy! When you’re sleeping at night and your parts are resting, that little machine is working to make new blood cells, repair your organs and tissues, and otherwise hit refresh on the whole operation.

The one catch, though, is that it can use only the materials you give it to make those repairs. So if you’re indulging in not-so-healthy habits, then your body is working overtime to keep that outside nastiness from doing harm to the rest of you. And that means basic upkeep starts to fall by the wayside. Soon your skin isn’t clearing up the way it used to, your poop is all backed up, your menstrual cycle is all over the place, your allergy flare-ups are worse, your aches and pains are more persistent, and so goes the list. If you’re having trouble conceiving, then your body most likely isn’t getting what it needs—or is getting too much of what it doesn’t—and it’s taking it out on your baby house. But if you give your body the nourishing, restorative resources it needs to repair and rebuild, then it can do what it does best: heal!

Your baby house needs maintenance, too. When you’re pregnant, it’s like your body becomes a walking, talking baby condo. You wouldn’t want to bring your baby into a junk-filled house with a leaky roof and backed-up plumbing, right? Chances are your baby is on the same page. As obstetrician-gynecologist Tracy Gaudet, MD, said in an interview with US News and World Report, Sometimes the body’s refusal to get pregnant can be a sign of its wisdom. She explained that if you’re overweight, for example, you’re at an increased risk for pregnancy complications like high blood pressure, diabetes, and an abnormally large baby. So it might not be a coincidence that all the estrogen that’s made by excess body fat messes with ovulation.¹ And as Randine Lewis, PhD, who is a healer and fertility expert and the author of The Way of the Fertile Soul, sums it up, Nature knows when you are in harmony with yourself and your environment. When animals in the wild are stressed and deprived, they don’t go into heat. Nature knows this is incompatible with life. When humans go through the same, we frantically go to a doctor to see if they can ‘fix it.’ They can’t; only you can.

Just because you don’t take medication every day doesn’t mean you’re well. I hate to burst your bubble, but needing coffee and soda for a pick-me-up, aspirin for that nagging headache, antacids to wash down lunch, and another pill to fall asleep isn’t the picture of health. When I was backstage at a daytime TV show to talk about my first book, The Kind Diet, I got to watch while the segment before mine finished taping. It featured a woman who couldn’t get pregnant and was clearly at the end of her rope. For 20 minutes, the panel of experts rattled off a long list of all the tests she could undergo to get to the bottom of her infertility. But consider this: She was overweight and a smoker. This woman was clearly sick! Her baby house couldn’t have been in any shape to support a growing baby. There she was, facing what some might consider the oracles of medicine—an obstetrics specialist, a pediatrician, a surgeon, and a physician—and yet it took 20 minutes for someone to tell her to stop smoking and clean up her diet.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m fully aware that there are plenty of women out there who are popping out babies and basically live on cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and potato chips. Does that mean those babies are healthy and that the mamas are happy and able to embrace the joy and simplicity of total goddess mamahood? I’m not so sure. Plus, the fact remains: If you’re having trouble getting pregnant, something’s got to give. So let’s not keep this magical secret under wraps any longer! It’s time to shout from the rooftops what is really the culprit behind your broken-down baby house. It’s time to get back in balance. It’s time to clean out your baby house.

WHY YOUR BABY HOUSE MIGHT NOT BE REACHING ITS POTENTIAL

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most commonly cited causes of infertility—defined as not getting pregnant after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sex—are being overweight, problems with ovulation and irregular or absent periods, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, uterine fibroids, and pelvic inflammatory disease.² In almost every case, the problem is linked to inflammation and/or hormonal imbalance,³ which can be caused by diet. A number of mucky culprits are at work: animal fats, dairy, sugar, and toxic chemicals. These foods may increase your estrogen levels,⁴ which then can throw off your menstrual cycle.⁵ They cause inflammation and, especially in the case of animal fats, carry nasty toxic chemicals that increase your risk for endometriosis and hormonal imbalance issues.⁶ (Don’t worry, we’ll explore all of this in much more detail in just a bit!)

We aren’t talking about consuming these foods in excess either. Harvard Medical School’s Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest and longest-running investigations of factors that influence women’s health, showed that adding just one serving a day of red meat, chicken, or turkey to your diet could increase your risk of infertility by a third. In women with the highest intake of animal protein, ovulatory infertility was 39 percent more likely. Animal fats and trans fats—which are often hidden in fast food and most manufactured foods—can even get in the way of ovulation, cause endometriosis, and affect early development of your baby.⁷ As for dairy, another study done at Harvard Medical School found a positive correlation between drinking milk and infertility, which only gets worse as you age. But before you think that old is a long ways away, consider that the study saw a decline in fertility in subjects as young as 20 to 24.⁸

Plus, our bodies aren’t made to have babies forever. It’s simply nature at work, the cosmic design made us most fertile in our late teens and twenties. The longer in life we wait to have babies, the less vibrant our machinery becomes, and the more worn down our bodies can get from bad habits. And yet, more and more American women now wait to have their first child until after age 35. But a third of the couples in which the woman is older than 35 have fertility problems.⁹ While I’m certainly not advocating that you go out and have a baby ASAP, I am advocating that you do everything in your power to get yourself as healthy as possible. I know firsthand how important that is because I had Bear when I was 34 and I definitely plan to have another baby one day.

Here comes the really, really good news: We can change all this! And what’s more, it’s never too late to get healthy. I’ve seen so many people transform their lives. So now are you dying to know what the remedy is? The cure-all solution that prepares your body for having a baby, wards off totally unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) pregnancy side effects, costs dramatically less than expensive fertility treatments, and is the key to a balanced, vibrant life for you and your baby? It’s as simple as what you eat.

What you put in your mouth is one of the biggest factors affecting how your body works and feels. The cleaner, more cell-loving, oxygen-pumping, nutrient-rocking food you put in your body, the better your body can do what you ask of it. Getting pregnant and having a blissful 9 months are no exceptions. But don’t just take it from me—or Harvard. Listen to these experts:

WHAT THE DOCS SAY: Katherine Thurer, MD, an integrative gynecologist at the Raby Institute for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern University

Diet is huge! It has an enormous role in every aspect of our health across the board, and fertility is part of that. Switching to an anti-inflammatory diet is the number one thing I recommend. It can help ovulation-related difficulties and conditions that are inflammatory or estrogen dominant like PCOS, endometriosis, and thyroid problems. Plus, infertility is often something that feels so out of control for a couple, and one element that a woman can control is what she puts in her mouth.

Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MD, OB-GYN and clinical Ayurvedic specialist at Women’s Care of Beverly Hills

While there’s not much scientific evidence on diet and conception, that may be because there’s not a lot of money in it. And that’s where I end up having my own personal and professional dilemma, because we live in a world that requires empirical scientific support for everything. . . . But my common sense—and my Ayurvedic guidance—tells me that we are literally what we eat. The truth is that we’re constantly changing, which is amazing, but what those cells are being created from is what we consume. So it stands to reason that what we eat has a major influence on how we function.

WHAT THE HEALER SAYS: Diane Avoli, macrobiotic counselor and instructor at the Kushi Institute

The clogging up of the reproductive system seems to be one of the main causes of infertility, and that comes from diet. But we can absolutely turn things around, at any age.

So let’s go make room for that tiny special guest and, while we’re at it, get you feeling better than you ever have in your life.

The Octomomification of America: The Scary Truth about Fertility Drugs

We’ve found ourselves in a baby crisis. Married women in the prime of their childbearing years are having fewer babies than ever, and infertility affects 10 percent or 6.1 million women ages 15 to 44 in the United States.¹⁰ That’s like the entire state of Missouri not being able to have a baby!¹¹ What’s worse, women are being convinced to navigate a scary and expensive maze of no-sure-thing promises—because the truth is there’s no money in the recommendation to clean up your diet. Can you imagine a world where doctors got kickbacks from the kale lobby?! There’s also not a lot of education about food as medicine. A majority of medical schools still fail to meet the bare-minimum recommendation of 25 hours for nutrition-related instruction.¹² So the best prescription for total wellness just isn’t being talked about enough.

The current reality for infertile couples looking to get pregnant goes something like this: Your doctor will most likely first prescribe low-potency fertility pills, which, while good at boosting ovulation, are also great for boosting the chances you’ll conceive multiples (more on that in a bit). If that treatment doesn’t take, you might move on to intrauterine insemination (IUI), which has a low success rate (only 5 to 20 percent per treatment),¹³ though when it does work, it frequently leads to multiples, too.

That leaves in vitro fertilization (IVF).¹⁴ What would ideally happen is your doctor would implant a single embryo in your uterus and let your body finish the job of creating a single child. But even though the industry’s guidelines encourage the single-embryo approach,¹⁵ many doctors routinely ignore the advice. Instead, many believe that more embryos equals a higher chance of conception, which is great for their success rate and therefore excellent for their bottom line.¹⁶ The only problem is, carrying multiples—of which you now have a 20 to 40 percent chance if you’ve been implanted with two or more embryos¹⁷—can lead to a host of risks that affect both your life and the babies’. And that risk gets greater with methods like IUI. Sixty percent of twins are born prematurely, a rate that increases with each additional baby. Premature birth is a risk factor for death in the first few days of life and for problems like bleeding in the brain, eye and ear impairments, developmental delays, and learning disabilities. You run a higher risk for preeclampsia and gestational diabetes with multiples.¹⁸

Is it impressive that we’ve achieved the technology to create babies in women who maybe can’t get pregnant? Sure. But just how far should we take it? And what if we spent all the time and money it took to create that technology and actually taught people how to get well?

3

Transforming Your Body into a Clean, Mean, Baby-Making Machine

Embracing foods that heal is the ultimate solution for maximizing your baby-making prowess. (It helps, too, that a naturally balanced diet will make you feel sexier than ever!) And once pregnant, you won’t need to worry about having the bloated, moody, and otherwise miserable experience that has become the norm. You’ll feel more comfortable in your own dewy, delicious skin and be more confident. You’ll have more energy, your immune system will work more efficiently, and your body will be better at mending itself after you give birth.

Plus, once you clear away the gunk that’s clogging up your body, you unclog your mind as well. You’ll be able to tap into your most grounded, truest self, which is so crucial for being a mama. Because when you can tune in to your own needs, you get better at hearing your baby’s, too. And a healthy baby is a happy baby.

All of this starts with lovely, wonderful plants—or what I like to call kind food.

These incredible, life-changing, life-creating foods are the ultimate baby house–scrubbing task force. Eating a plant-based diet is one of the biggest boosts to your chances of getting pregnant.¹⁹ Plants help balance our hormones, maintain stable blood sugar and pressure, and generally fuel all of our machinery in a cleaner, more efficient way. Eating them means not only boosting the odds of conceiving but also setting the stage for a transcendent pregnancy, a smoother birth, a healthier baby, and long-term protection from almost every disease there is.

Plant-based foods—or kind foods—are nature’s way of giving us sun-powered health at its most delicious. There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods—including protein and iron—that aren’t better provided by plants.²⁰ Kind foods can supercharge fertility; reduce the likelihood of miscarriage;²¹ infuse breast milk with all kinds of nutrient goodness that make your kid smart and healthy; and help stave off diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and high blood pressure. Groundbreaking authorities like Drs. T. Colin Campbell, Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., and John McDougall have demonstrated that changing your diet to include more kind food and less nasty food (more on this in Chapter 4) can help you live longer, feel younger, lose weight, have more energy, preserve your eyesight, keep your mind sharp, and have a more vibrant sex life. They also assert that it can demolish your need for pharmaceutical drugs, especially for the treatment of things like depression, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension. And because the Food and Drug Administration estimates that 10 percent or more of birth defects result from medications taken during pregnancy—things like prescription painkillers, antidepressants, and thyroid medications²²—that’s a pretty big deal. These doctors agree that eating a diet rich in Mama Earth’s little miracles can turn you into a super-healthy clean machine, and isn’t that the kind of house you want to build for your baby?

So how exactly are plants going to get you pregnant, keep you healthy, make you feel beautiful, and protect both you and your baby from a huge number of ailments? Check this out:

KIND CAN FIX THE BABY HOUSE

As integrative gynecologist Katherine Thurer, MD, illuminated in the previous chapter, inflammation is at the root of a number of baby house ills. And where inflammation isn’t the culprit, hormonal imbalance often is. Well, guess what? Plants have an incredible alkalizing effect on the body, which combats inflammation. And a diet that is high in whole plant foods can help rebalance the body’s estrogen levels,²³ since all that super-cleaning fiber helps rid the body of excess substances it doesn’t need, including detoxified hormones.²⁴ Plus, a plant-based diet can help reverse obesity, which has been linked to fertility challenges like high blood pressure and diabetes,²⁵ in addition to being an effective answer to polycystic ovary syndrome. According to one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, losing as little as 5 percent of your body weight can improve your body’s sensitivity to insulin, lower levels of hormones that mess with fertility, and improve menstrual regularity and ovulation.²⁶ (Check out Kind’s Beauty Bonus to see why that will be easy peasy!) Women who eat the highest amounts of foods rich in lignans, a type of phytoestrogen found in flaxseed and whole grains, have less than half the risk of fibroids compared with women who generally don’t eat these foods.²⁷ And women who have 14 or more servings of vegetables a week have a 70 percent lower risk of endometriosis compared with those who ate fewer than 6 servings a week.²⁸

So let’s recap: lower infertility-causing inflammation! Less risk of hormonal imbalance, obesity, and high blood pressure! Less risk of polycystic ovary syndrome, fibroids, and endometriosis! That’s what’s in store for your baby house when plants are on the menu. Believe me, when you start making some of the scrumptious veggie dishes I’ve included in this book, you’ll see just how delicious a prescription this is. But before we get there, here are a few more reasons why you and plants are about to become best friends.

Mama to Mama on . . . Getting Healthy

My husband and I both lost a significant amount of weight the year before [we started] trying to conceive. We were both unhappy and chronically tired and thought going vegan would make a difference in our health. In 3 days, we noticed an increase in energy. In 2 weeks, I was able to walk around the block, which was previously impossible due to shin and foot pain. Four months later, I was jogging a 3-K and my husband was running. He lost 70 pounds and I lost 50. When it came time to try to get pregnant, it only took us 4 months!

—Kimberly Taylor, Forest Park, Illinois

KIND HAS FIBER POWER

Of all the amazing gifts of plants, fiber is at the top of the list. When we eat plants, it’s like sending a scrubbing-bubble task force through our intestines. Because we don’t digest most of the fiber we eat, it not only helps move things along from entrance to exit but also sucks up many chemicals and toxins it encounters on its way out. Not getting enough fiber can cause constipation-based disorders like bloating and hemorrhoids and diseases like large bowel cancer.²⁹ The more fiber you eat, however, the lower risk you have for gestational diabetes,³⁰ high blood cholesterol, and rectum and colon cancers.

KIND IS YOUR BEST BODYGUARD AGAINST DISEASE

Plants have the ability to put up a shield whenever they’re under attack from potentially dangerous toxins or free radicals. These shields—made out of a chemical blend called phytochemicals—soak up the invaders and keep them from harming the plants’ tissues. As genius as our bodies are, they can’t do that on their own. When free radicals, industrial pollutants, or toxins hiding in animal foods (which we’ll talk about in the next chapter) enter our system, they wreak serious havoc. They can cause our tissue to start breaking down, which can lead to Alzheimer’s and dementia, cataracts, hardening of the arteries, cancer, emphysema, and arthritis. Luckily, though, when we eat plants, they lend us their power to fight evil. And like any superhero team, each plant comes equipped with its own special antioxidant properties, which is why it’s crucial to get a variety of colors on your plate.³¹

Kind’s Beauty Bonus

When your insides are working like they should to clean and purify your system, your outside shows it. The same phytochemicals that keep you from getting sick also protect your cells from damage and produce more collagen, which is the ultimate in antiwrinkle technology. Whole grains are packed with B-complex vitamins essential for beautiful, glowing skin. And sea vegetables—a Kind Mama’s secret weapon—are so rich in minerals and nutrients that they boost circulation and detoxify the body, giving you firmer, more revitalized skin, stronger nails, and glossier hair.

KIND GIVES BABIES A HEALTHIER START

Believe it or not, nature and nurture aren’t the only contestants in the how-will-my-baby-turnout competition. We have control over how our babies’ genes will express themselves. This idea is currently being studied in a cutting-edge field called epigenetics, which focuses on the environment around the genes.³² So while we’ve given our babies our DNA, everything from what we eat to how we act and feel during pregnancy can affect how those genes are expressed. Think about this crazy fact: When women are obese during their first pregnancy, then lose weight before getting pregnant again, the babies born pre–weight loss are heavier than those born afterward. It’s because a less healthy mama’s body teaches baby’s body things like storing more fat and having a slower metabolism.³³ But if we teach a baby’s growing body how to be healthy in our bellies, there’s a very good chance that baby will continue to flourish and thrive on the outside.³⁴ A growing amount of evidence suggests that adult diseases and conditions like high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes are linked to early nutritional influence on the fetus.³⁵ After all, the organs we grow in utero are the ones we have for life!

Kind’s Eco Bonus

You’ll score major karma points from eating plants because eating kind food is about the greenest thing you can do! It requires less fuel, water, and other precious resources than plants’ mooing, oinking, clucking, and bleating counterparts.

You know, I’m not the only one who believes in the amazing healing power of plants. Check this out:

• Harvard researchers have proved that eating a diet rich in whole grains, beans, and vegetables can improve ovulation and your chances of getting pregnant.³⁶

• A British study showed that women who eat fruits and vegetables daily were 46 percent less likely to miscarry.³⁷

• The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) says that a well-rounded vegetarian diet is not only nutritionally adequate for