Starches Are the Solution to Your Weight and Health Problems

For years, the best­seller lists have been dom­i­nat­ed by books urg­ing peo­ple to eat plen­ty of meat and fat but to shun car­bo­hy­drates. The Atkins Diet led the parade; but there have been many imi­ta­tors, such as the Zone, the South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, and the Dukan Diet. Even some of the veg­an-ori­ent­ed books encour­age peo­ple to avoid starch­es. Yet the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence shows us that human beings are specif­i­cal­ly adapt­ed to thrive on a starchy diet. So I was delight­ed to see that the title of Dr. John McDougall’s lat­est book is The Starch Solu­tion. He explains some­thing that nutri­tion­al epi­demi­ol­o­gists and experts on clin­i­cal nutri­tion have known for many years, name­ly that human beings stay nat­u­ral­ly slim and healthy on a diet based on unre­fined starch­es and veg­eta­bles.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Starch­es Are the Solu­tion to Your Weight and Health Prob­lems”

Constipation Can Cause Pants-Wetting and Bed-Wetting

Back in Novem­ber 2011, I explained that chil­dren who “refuse” to have bow­el move­ments in the pot­ty or are “hold­ing” their stool for days on end aren’t mis­be­hav­ing, they’re con­sti­pat­ed. Recent­ly, I saw some pub­lished stud­ies (click here and here) that showed that con­sti­pa­tion can also cause pants-wet­ting and bed-wet­ting acci­dents. Those stud­ies showed that the prob­lem could often be solved by giv­ing the child lax­a­tives. A bet­ter solu­tion would be to feed the child a diet that would pre­vent con­sti­pa­tion to begin with: a plant-based diet with no dairy prod­ucts.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Con­sti­pa­tion Can Cause Pants-Wet­ting and Bed-Wet­ting”

Why I Think the Paleo Diet Is Silly

Late­ly, many nutri­tion gurus have been pro­mot­ing what they call a “paleo” diet. The word “paleo” comes from Pale­olith­ic, which lit­er­al­ly means “ear­ly stone age.” They think that human beings ought to be eat­ing a diet like the diet that peo­ple ate dur­ing the ear­ly stone age. Per­son­al­ly, I think that the argu­ments in favor of the paleo diet are sil­ly, for sev­er­al rea­sons. I think that the appeal of the paleo diet is based on ado­les­cent male fan­tasies of being an unwashed, unshaven big game hunter who gets to spend time with a hot-look­ing maid­en in a fur or leather biki­ni. Real men don’t eat quiche. They eat bron­to­burg­ers:

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Why I Think the Paleo Diet Is Sil­ly”

The USDA’s “My Plate” Makes No Sense

If you’ve ever watched Sesame Street, you may remem­ber the song about cat­e­gories: “One of these things is not like the oth­ers. One of these things just doesn’t belong.” That song ran through my head when I looked at the USDA’s My Plate food group sys­tem, which fea­tures veg­eta­bles, fruits, grains, dairy, and pro­tein. One of the foods groups isn’t like the oth­ers and just doesn’t belong. Can you guess which one?

Con­tin­ue read­ing “The USDA’s “My Plate” Makes No Sense”

What is Diverticulitis?

A friend of mine recent­ly had a brush with death. She was unknow­ing­ly car­ry­ing a time bomb in her large intes­tine, and when it went off, it near­ly took her with it. She had a diver­tic­u­lar abscess, which burst and thus allowed the bac­te­ria to get into her abdom­i­nal cav­i­ty. That caused a prob­lem called peri­toni­tis.

All things con­sid­ered, she got off easy. She had to have emer­gency surgery to remove the dam­aged por­tion of her large intes­tine and clean up the mess in her abdomen. She may have a fierce-look­ing scar, but she’s alive, and she can still go to the bath­room nor­mal­ly, instead of into a colosto­my bag on her side.

The prob­lem start­ed when part of the wall of her large intes­tine “bal­looned out” to form a lit­tle pouch called a diver­tic­u­lum. When you have these diver­tic­u­la, the con­di­tion is called diver­tic­u­lo­sis. Here’s what diver­tic­u­lo­sis looks like, from inside the large intes­tine:

About half of Amer­i­cans over 50 years of age have diver­tic­u­lo­sis and don’t even know it. Diver­tic­u­lo­sis may cause mild, inter­mit­tent symp­toms of pain and bloat­ing in the low­er left side of the bel­ly. It may cause bouts of diar­rhea and con­sti­pa­tion. It is a com­mon cause of rec­tal bleed­ing in peo­ple over 40 years of age. Or it may cause no symp­toms at all. If one of the diver­tic­u­la gets infect­ed, the con­di­tion is called diver­ti­c­uli­tis. It’s just like appen­dici­tis, except that the symp­toms are worse on the low­er left, rather than the low­er right, side of the bel­ly. If the inflamed diver­tic­u­lum bursts, you can end up with life-threat­en­ing peri­toni­tis.

Diver­tic­u­lar dis­ease is com­mon in the Unit­ed States. How­ev­er, it’s rare in places like Africa and Asia, where peo­ple eat a high-fiber, plant-based diet. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Insti­tute of Dia­betes and Diges­tive and Kid­ney Dis­eases (NIDDK), the best treat­ment for most cas­es of diver­tic­u­lo­sis is a high-fiber diet. Both sol­u­ble and insol­u­ble fiber are help­ful, because they retain water and make the stool soft­er and eas­i­er to pass. If the mus­cles of the large intes­tine don’t have to strain so hard, they won’t gen­er­ate the high pres­sure that can cause a diver­tic­u­lum to form.

Some doc­tors say that peo­ple with diver­tic­u­lo­sis should avoid eat­ing small seeds, such as those in toma­toes or rasp­ber­ries. How­ev­er, the NIDDK says that there is no sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion to sup­port that rec­om­men­da­tion.

Dairy prod­ucts increase the risk for diver­tic­u­lo­sis by caus­ing con­sti­pa­tion. When dairy pro­tein is digest­ed, it can pro­duce mor­phine-like com­pounds that slow down the mus­cles that are sup­posed to push food through the intestines.

To pre­vent diver­tic­u­lo­sis, pre­vent con­sti­pa­tion. Eat lots and lots of unre­fined starch­es and veg­eta­bles. Avoid dairy prod­ucts. A diet like that is also good for main­tain­ing a healthy weight, con­trol­ling your cho­les­terol and blood sug­ar, and pre­vent­ing osteo­poro­sis.

Scientists Rediscover That Starvation Cures Type 2 Diabetes

Yes, you can reverse type 2 dia­betes if you starve your­self. In fact, a med­ical­ly super­vised water-only fast can be a use­ful way to man­age many dif­fer­ent kinds of diet-relat­ed dis­eases. For­tu­nate­ly, you do not have to starve your­self to reverse your type 2 dia­betes. Instead, you could sim­ply eat a low-fat, plant-based diet—like the pop­u­la­tions that don’t get type 2 dia­betes to begin with.

In June of 2011, some researchers from Britain pub­lished the results of a tri­al in which peo­ple with type 2 dia­betes who went on a star­va­tion diet (600 calo­ries per day) end­ed up with nor­mal fast­ing blood sug­ar lev­els. To me, that is not news. By 1841, a French phar­ma­cist named Apol­li­naire Bauchar­dat was rec­om­mend­ing that patients with what we now call type 2 dia­betes should eat as lit­tle as pos­si­ble and that they should fast occa­sion­al­ly to bring down their blood sug­ar. Since then, how­ev­er, dia­betes researchers have learned that it’s pos­si­ble to reverse type 2 dia­betes with­out such severe calo­rie restric­tion. In fact, I think that it’s bet­ter to teach peo­ple the diet that will enable them to cure their type 2 dia­betes with­in a cou­ple of weeks with­out lim­it­ing their food intake than to set them on a course of yo-yo diet­ing and pos­si­ble eat­ing dis­or­ders.

Bouchar­dat was one of the first clin­i­cians to put patients in charge of mon­i­tor­ing their own dia­betes. At first, his patients did this by keep­ing track of what they ate and tast­ing their urine to see how sweet it became. Lat­er, Bauchar­dat worked out a chem­i­cal test to detect sug­ar in urine. From mon­i­tor­ing the sug­ar con­tent of the urine, Bauchar­dat showed that when peo­ple with dia­betes ate sug­ars or starch­es, large amounts of sug­ar passed into their urine. The sug­ar in the urine reflect­ed high blood glu­cose lev­els. How­ev­er, the prob­lem in type 2 dia­betes is not that the per­son is eat­ing car­bo­hy­drates, it’s that the body has become resis­tant to the hor­mone insulin.

Start­ing in the 1930s, sci­en­tists start­ed to real­ize that fat­ty diets made the body less sen­si­tive to insulin, and that this insulin insen­si­tiv­i­ty was the under­ly­ing cause of the high blood sug­ar lev­els in peo­ple with type 2 dia­betes. Peo­ple who went on a low-fat, high-car­bo­hy­drate diet rapid­ly became more respon­sive to insulin.

Start­ing in the 1940s, Dr. Wal­ter Kemp­n­er at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty report­ed aston­ish­ing suc­cess in revers­ing type 2 dia­betes and dia­bet­ic com­pli­ca­tions with a diet based entire­ly on rice and fruit. Patients who found that they were los­ing too much weight on that low-fat diet were encour­aged to add pure white sug­ar to get more calo­ries. In Kempner’s report of 100 patients with dia­betes who were fed his high-car­bo­hy­drate, low-fat, low-pro­tein diet, most of the patients decreased their insulin dos­es and many dis­con­tin­ued tak­ing insulin. (It’s like­ly that some of the patients had type 1 dia­betes and there­fore would need to keep tak­ing insulin for the rest of their lives.)

The Amer­i­can Dia­betes Asso­ci­a­tion cur­rent­ly rec­om­mends that peo­ple with type 2 dia­betes eat lim­it­ed por­tions of foods from all of the four food groups. In 2006, how­ev­er, a clin­i­cal tri­al showed that the peo­ple who were ran­dom­ly assigned to eat as much as they liked of low-fat, unre­fined plant foods (75% car­bo­hy­drate by calo­rie) found it eas­i­er to stick to their diet, lost more weight, and made faster progress in revers­ing their dia­betes than did the peo­ple who were ran­dom­ly assigned to fol­low the ADA’s rec­om­men­da­tions.


Behind Barbed Wire_PrintNote: In my book Thin Dia­betes, Fat Dia­betes: Pre­vent Type 1, Cure Type 2, I explain the rela­tion­ship between body weight and blood sug­ar. French doc­tors have always used the term fat dia­betes (dia­bètes mai­gre) to refer to the rel­a­tive mild form of dia­betes that occurs in peo­ple who are at least a lit­tle bit over­weight and that goes away if they lose weight. Fat dia­betes is the body’s way to avoid stor­ing too much of the fat from a fat­ty diet. If you have fat dia­betes, it means that you are a nat­u­ral­ly thin per­son. It means that your body is will­ing to sac­ri­fice everything—your feet, your eye­sight, your kid­neys, and even your life—to keep you from gain­ing any more weight. The solu­tion to this prob­lem is to switch to a low-fat, high-car­bo­hy­drate, high-fiber diet. This diet revers­es type 2 dia­betes and is also good for peo­ple with thin dia­betes (type 1 dia­betes).

Wild Animals Don’t Count Calories or Sign Up for Step Aerobics

Have you ever seen an obese wild ani­mal? Look at these wilde­beests in Krüger Nation­al Park in South Africa. There’s no cel­lulite on their thighs! Wilde­beest weigh only 40 pounds at birth, but then they gain weight rapid­ly. By the time they’re a year old, they weigh about 200 pounds. The females reach a peak weight of about 350 pounds at 4 years of age. The males peak at 500 pounds at 5 years of age. Yet after that, their weight stays remark­ably sta­ble. Why do they stop gain­ing weight? Since they don’t start count­ing calo­ries or tak­ing step aer­o­bics class­es in adult­hood, they must have some built-in mech­a­nisms that reg­u­late their weight nat­u­ral­ly. Do humans also have in-born weight-con­trol mech­a­nisms? If so, why have so many peo­ple been get­ting so fat late­ly?

To keep our body weight at a nor­mal lev­el, we are told to engage in unnat­ur­al behav­iors. We’re told to eat less and move more. Yet wild ani­mals nev­er lim­it their food por­tions, and they do only the amount of activ­i­ty they feel like doing. I think that their secret for stay­ing slim is that they eat the kind of food that is appro­pri­ate for their species. If you trapped some wilde­beest in a pen and fed them a diet that was much rich­er in calo­ries than what they ate in the wild, they’d prob­a­bly get fat. That’s what has hap­pened to human beings in indus­tri­al­ized soci­eties. To cure our weight prob­lems, we need to escape from our cubi­cles and start eat­ing a more nat­ur­al diet. Go play out­side, and eat low-fat unre­fined plant foods instead of eat­ing ani­mals and processed foods.

wild-animals

When you look at pop­u­la­tions all over the world, you’ll notice that the peo­ple who eat a diet based on unre­fined plant foods stay nat­u­ral­ly slim and remark­ably free of heart dis­ease and dia­betes and oth­er chron­ic dis­eases. For many gen­er­a­tions, most of the world’s pop­u­la­tion ate like that. Only the rich could afford to eat large serv­ings of rich foods, such as meats and but­ter and hon­ey, on a reg­u­lar basis. As a result, only rich peo­ple suf­fered from obe­si­ty, gout, and ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis. Because of agri­cul­tur­al poli­cies, those foods have now become cheap while fresh fruit and veg­eta­bles are still rel­a­tive­ly expen­sive. As a result, the “dis­eases of afflu­ence” are now a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for poor peo­ple in the Unit­ed States.

Pho­to by h.koppdelaney


Behind Barbed Wire_PrintNote: In my book Thin Dia­betes, Fat Dia­betes: Pre­vent Type 1, Cure Type 2, you can learn more about how a low-fat, high-fiber, high-car­bo­hy­drate diet helps peo­ple lose weight and revers­es their type 2 dia­betes.

Does Tofurkey Subliminally “Glorify” Meat-Eating?

David Siro­ta wrote an arti­cle that sug­gests that the veg­e­tar­i­an prod­ucts that mim­ic meat prod­ucts under­mine veg­e­tar­i­an­ism by glo­ri­fy­ing the con­sump­tion of meat. I had to laugh because I hon­est­ly couldn’t imag­ine Tofurkey glo­ri­fy­ing any­thing. Nor do I think that rice milk glo­ri­fies cow’s milk or that a tofu scram­ble glo­ri­fies eggs. Yet the use of these foods does raise two impor­tant nutri­tion-relat­ed ques­tions: What kind of diet is tru­ly healthy for a human being, and how can we help peo­ple find sat­is­fac­tion and delight from a tru­ly healthy diet?

Many veg­e­tar­i­ans depend heav­i­ly on the soy fake meats and “cheezes” because they are wor­ried about get­ting enough pro­tein in their diet. In real­i­ty, you don’t need to eat fake meat or cheeze to get enough pro­tein. It’s prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble to find real cas­es of pro­tein defi­cien­cy in peo­ple who were get­ting enough calo­ries from any rea­son­able plant-based diet. To find cas­es of pure pro­tein defi­cien­cy, you have to look at peo­ple who have been fed noth­ing but glu­cose intra­venous­ly, or peo­ple who have a diges­tive or meta­bol­ic dis­ease, or babies who were fed some bizarre sub­sti­tute for breast milk.

Plants pro­vide all of the nutri­ents that are essen­tial for human nutri­tion, except for vit­a­min D and vit­a­min B12. Your body makes its own sup­ply of vit­a­min D if you go out in the sun­shine, and vit­a­min B12 comes from bac­te­ria. So there’s no nutri­tion­al need to include ani­mal-based food in the diet. On the con­trary, the less ani­mal-based food a pop­u­la­tion eats, the low­er its rates of death from heart dis­ease, can­cer, dia­betes, and oth­er chron­ic dis­eases tend to be.

So what about the refined plant-based foods that resem­ble ani­mal foods? Do they pose the same health threats as real ani­mal-based foods? The answer is a bit com­pli­cat­ed. The health threats that they could pose depend on how close­ly they resem­ble the ani­mal-based foods they replace.

Ani­mal-based foods con­tain fat and cho­les­terol but no fiber. No veg­an prod­ucts con­tain any cho­les­terol, but some of them do con­tain a lot of fat and lit­tle or no fiber. Thus, they could pro­mote weight gain and high cho­les­terol lev­els. Pota­to chips are veg­an; but because of all that fat and salt, they’re almost as bad for you as pork rinds.

Ani­mal-based foods con­tain far more pro­tein than you need. This excess pro­tein puts a strain on the liv­er and kid­neys. The “high-qual­i­ty” pro­tein in dairy prod­ucts, in par­tic­u­lar, also caus­es the liv­er to release a pow­er­ful growth hor­mone (IGF-1) that pro­motes the growth of can­cers. Huge serv­ings of soy pro­tein also pro­mote the secre­tion of IGF-1, but to a less­er extent than dairy prod­ucts do.

The pro­teins in ani­mal-based foods are sim­i­lar to but not exact­ly like the pro­teins in the human body. If they find their way into the blood­stream before they are com­plete­ly bro­ken down, they may cause the immune sys­tem to pro­duce anti­bod­ies that go on to attack the body’s own tis­sues. A switch to a plant-based diet can dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce this risk. How­ev­er, some of the fake ani­mal prod­ucts are based on wheat gluten, which can cause autoim­mune prob­lems in a small per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion. For this rea­son, peo­ple with celi­ac dis­ease or oth­er wheat sen­si­tiv­i­ty can­not eat sei­tan.

Real meats and cheeses are high in fat but devoid of starch. The fake stuff also tends to be high in fat and low in starch. All fats are fat­ten­ing, and some of the fats from plant sources are par­tic­u­lar­ly pow­er­ful pro­mot­ers of can­cer. The plant-based diets that are tru­ly good for human health are high in fiber and starch and low in fat.

Ani­mals have hor­mones that are very much like our own. When peo­ple eat ani­mal foods, they get a dose of these hor­mones, even if the ani­mals were raised organ­i­cal­ly. Plants have dif­fer­ent hor­mones. Some plants con­tain phy­toe­stro­gens, which are sub­stances that have some sort of effect on estro­gen recep­tors. How­ev­er, some of the phy­toe­stro­gens are estro­gen block­ers or weak estro­gens that com­pete with the body’s nat­ur­al estro­gens, thus decreas­ing the effects that our native estro­gen has on our tis­sues.

Ani­mals absorb tox­ins from their envi­ron­ment and store them in their fat­ty tis­sue. That’s why it’s good to eat “low on the food chain.” The processed fake meats and cheezes are low on the food chain, but you may have to con­sid­er what kinds of addi­tives are in them.

Many peo­ple advo­cate the use of the fake meats and cheezes sort of as train­ing wheels to help peo­ple adjust to a plant-based diet. My con­cern with that approach is that these foods can be unsat­is­fy­ing because they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly taste like the real thing. Rather than serv­ing a food that is a dim echo of some­thing else, why not serve some­thing that can stand on its own? Why eat an unsat­is­fy­ing soy pat­ty when you could eat a gen­uine bean bur­ri­to?

I use a lit­tle bit of tofu or soy milk now and then. The “fake meat” that I use exten­sive­ly is mush­rooms and nutri­tion­al yeast. I make a gar­licky low-fat mush­room gravy and serve it over huge mounds of mashed pota­toes. I add either mush­rooms or nutri­tion­al yeast to hearty stews, and nobody cares that I didn’t use a ham­bone.Pho­to by Andrea_Nguyen

To Protect Your Feet, Cure Your Type 2 Diabetes

Dia­betes is the num­ber 1 cause of non­trau­mat­ic ampu­ta­tions in the Unit­ed States. What’s tru­ly out­ra­geous is that most of these ampu­ta­tions are hap­pen­ing to peo­ple with the form of dia­betes that can eas­i­ly be cured, some­times with­in as lit­tle as a week, by a sim­ple change in diet. Just eat unre­fined plant foods instead of ani­mal-based foods and processed foods and cut your fat intake to 10% or less of calo­ries.

Type 2 dia­betes mel­li­tus is cured by remov­ing the cause, which is the fat­ty, low-fiber, stan­dard Amer­i­can diet. Peo­ple who switch to a high-fiber, low-fat (~10% of calo­ries), high-car­bo­hy­drate (75% of calo­ries), pure­ly plant-based (veg­an) diet become undi­a­bet­ic with­in a sur­pris­ing­ly short time. (They can get even quick­er results if they also start exer­cis­ing.) A prop­er diet can even relieve the ago­niz­ing pain and dan­ger­ous numb­ness from dia­bet­ic neu­ropa­thy in the feet with­in a mat­ter of days to weeks.

If You’re Eating for Two, Why Are You Vomiting?

One of the most com­mon symp­toms of ear­ly preg­nan­cy in human beings is nau­sea and vom­it­ing. Why do so many preg­nant women have so much trou­ble keep­ing food down at the very time that their need for calo­ries and oth­er nutri­ents has just gone up? Why is this prob­lem com­mon in women but seem­ing­ly nonex­is­tent in preg­nant females of oth­er species? Is there some­thing wrong with the design of human preg­nan­cy, or is there some­thing wrong with the food the preg­nant woman is eat­ing? I’m inclined to sus­pect the food, espe­cial­ly because morn­ing sick­ness is com­mon in the Unit­ed States but rare to nonex­is­tent in soci­eties whose sta­ple foods all come from plants.

Vom­it­ing is a pow­er­ful defense mech­a­nism. It effec­tive­ly removes tox­ins and infec­tious agents from the stom­ach and even the upper intestines. It’s nature’s way of expelling things that shouldn’t be allowed to enter the body. This defense mech­a­nism may be par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant dur­ing preg­nan­cy. Stud­ies have con­sis­tent­ly shown that women who vom­it dur­ing ear­ly preg­nan­cy are less like­ly to have a mis­car­riage than are those who mere­ly feel nau­se­at­ed. Per­haps it’s because the vom­it­ing pre­vent­ed things that would be harm­ful dur­ing ear­ly preg­nan­cy from enter­ing the woman’s body. Thus, it’s prob­a­bly no coin­ci­dence that the nau­sea and vom­it­ing asso­ci­at­ed with preg­nan­cy tend to be most severe dur­ing the first trimester, which is the most sen­si­tive phase of devel­op­ment.

In a clas­sic arti­cle, Samuel Flax­man and Paul Sher­man explained how morn­ing sick­ness could end up pro­tect­ing the moth­er and the preg­nan­cy. They argued that morn­ing sick­ness is most com­mon when the major organ sys­tems are devel­op­ing, and the vom­it­ing seems to be trig­gered by the foods and bev­er­ages that are most like­ly to be harm­ful to the moth­er and the preg­nan­cy. Flax­man and Sher­man point­ed out that in 9 out of 9 stud­ies, women who expe­ri­enced morn­ing sick­ness were much less like­ly to mis­car­ry.

Flax­man and Sher­man not­ed that many preg­nant women have aver­sions to alco­holic and non­al­co­holic (main­ly caf­feinat­ed) bev­er­ages and strong-tast­ing veg­eta­bles, but the great­est aver­sions were to meats, fish, poul­try, and eggs. The impor­tance of ani­mal-based foods in caus­ing morn­ing sick­ness also became obvi­ous in a cross-cul­tur­al com­par­i­son. Sev­en soci­eties that were free of morn­ing sick­ness were sig­nif­i­cant­ly less like­ly to have ani­mal foods as dietary sta­ples and were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to have only plants (main­ly corn) as sta­ple foods than were 20 soci­eties in which women expe­ri­ence morn­ing sick­ness.

Food­borne infec­tious or par­a­sitic dis­ease could be a seri­ous threat to the health of a preg­nant woman or her preg­nan­cy. Dur­ing preg­nan­cy, a woman’s immune sys­tem is already some­what sup­pressed, to keep it from attack­ing the preg­nan­cy. As a result, preg­nant women are more like­ly to catch seri­ous, poten­tial­ly dead­ly infec­tions. Infec­tious and par­a­sitic dis­eases are also a major threat to the devel­op­ing embryo. For exam­ple, if a preg­nant woman catch­es Tox­o­plas­ma, which is a par­a­site found in cat drop­pings or under­cooked beef, the par­a­site infec­tion could cause mis­car­riage, still­birth, or severe birth defects.

A preg­nant woman can pro­tect her health and her preg­nan­cy by sim­ply avoid­ing the foods that are like­ly to make her vom­it. A pure­ly plant-based diet pro­vides all of the nutri­ents that a preg­nant woman needs, except for vit­a­min D (which she can get from sun­shine) and vit­a­min B12 (which is made by bac­te­ria and is avail­able in a nice, clean tablet).

Pho­to by Tip­sTime­sAd­min