rich in vitamin K, which seems to help.
• Brown rice.
• Acupuncture (forearm needles for two days).
• Acupressure wristbands to stimulate pressure points.
• Fresh gingerroot in a cup of tea (or a 300 mg capsule).
• Light exercise.
• Use a mouth rinse after vomiting (and after each meal) to keep your mouth fresh, reduce nausea, and reduce the amount of tooth decay that can occur from the interaction of stomach acid with enamel.
• Meditate to help control stress. Morning sickness is more common in women under a lot of stress.
• Homeopathic remedies are hotly debated within the medical community but are unlikely to cause harm. Nux vomica seems to help with nausea and irritability.
Consider Meds. If your morning sickness is really bad, talk to your doc about prescription medications like scopolamine (Transderm Scop, Scopace), promethazine (Phenergan), prochlorperazine (Compazine), and trimethobenzamide (Tigan). You can also consider Diclectin, an over-the-counter (OTC) remedy available only in Canada. Each capsule contains 25 milligrams of vitamin B6 (pyridoxine), 5 milligrams of Unisom (the OTC sleeping medication that is not Benadryl), and 250 micrograms (.25 milligram) of folic acid. The manufacturer of Diclectin voluntarily withdrew the drug from the U.S. market (where it was known as Bendectin) in 1983 due to some safety concerns that were not borne out through study. As a result of all the accusations about Bendectin, it is now the best-studied agent for treating nausea, and lots of substantial research shows it may prove to be the safest antinausea agent. You should of course consult with your doc, but if you want to re-create Bendectin at home, take a combination of one 25 milligram tablet of vitamin B6 and one 5 milligram tablet of Unisom orally three or four times a day. (You’re already getting 400 micrograms of folic acid from your prenatal vitamin.)
Decide if You’re Nuts. Not nuts as in crazy, but nuts as in walnuts or even the legume, peanuts. There’s been a lot of talk about whether eating peanuts during pregnancy contributes to childhood peanut allergies or asthma. The research suggests that avoiding peanuts doesn’t seem to have an effect on nut allergies except when there’s a family history of extreme cases of the allergy. Eating peanuts during pregnancy has, however, been related to an increase in asthma rates. If you want to be supercautious, you can avoid peanuts and peanut butter, but generally, it’s okay to eat both during pregnancy. The more important issue is to make sure that you eat apples, fish, and omega-3 fatty acids like DHA, found in salmon and trout, fortified foods, and supplements, because they’ve been shown to help prevent asthma and avert allergies that can run in families. Eating them during pregnancy will help strengthen your child’s delicate immune system before the environment starts taking shots at it.
* An oxymoron if we ever heard one.
† Aspartame hangs out in your body for thirty-six hours. Blecch.
4 Growing to Extremes How to Make Sure Your Baby Isn’t Too Plump or Too Puny
At this moment in your life, we can guess what curves you’re likely obsessing about: your growing tummy, your fuller breasts, your figure in a maternity bathing suit. Now, though, is the time to shift gears and consider another kind of curve: the bell curve. We know, we know. Graphs and charts are about as compelling a topic as laundry detergent. But as we build on our discussion of nutrition from the last chapter, the classic bell curve helps make a vital point about how your baby’s weight in the womb will influence his lifelong health.
You already know how the bell curve looks and works. (See adjacent illustration if you need a refresher.) For whatever the given criteria, you have a small number at the two extreme ends and a big number in the middle; hence the bell shape. The traditional example: A school course that fits a bell-curve model would have a few students who earned A’s in a class, a few who got slapped with F’s, and the vast majority residing in the B, C, D world of the majority, the norm, the average. In pregnancy, the bell curve teaches us about what’s happening to your developing baby. Here’s the difference between the pregnancy model and the classroom one: The extreme ends of the bell curve don’t represent excellence and failure, as they do in the A and F example. Instead, your baby’s optimal grade rests right in the middle of the bell curve. Why? Because, at the risk of annoying our literature-teacher readers by adding a metaphor to a metaphor, Goldilocks was right about your baby’s size. You don’t want too big and you don’t want too small. You want just about right.
The fact is that even if you’re eating perfectly well and following all the guidelines for a safe pregnancy, something else could be causing your baby to receive the wrong amount of food—resulting in either undernutrition or overnutrition, both of which can put your baby at risk.
What’s at stake? For underdeveloped babies, there’s the risk that vital organs and tissues won’t develop enough to fully prepare them for life on the outside. For the plumper peeps? Too much baby fat can put both you and them at greater risk for developing complications from pregnancy. Why? For one thing, big babies raise your risk of stalled labor and cesarean section. For another, remember from chapter 1 that kids learn to forecast their future environments while in your belly. Not enough nutrition means they come to expect an environment of scarcity (there’s that thrifty phenotype again), thus sending the message that they should load up on Ding Dongs
Testing, Testing
It can be hard to tell from the surface whether you have gestational diabetes, so you should pay special attention if you have the risk factors or the main symptoms: increased thirst and urination, blurred vision, fatigue, and/or infections of the bladder, vagina, and skin. This issue is important: 25 percent of women with gestational diabetes will go on to develop full-blown diabetes, and the greatest risk is within the first five years after delivery, especially in overweight mothers.
Today all pregnant women are screened for diabetes, even those at low risk (under twenty-five, not obese, white, and no family history of diabetes). For a fasting blood test (no food within eight hours), blood sugar should be under 95 mg/dl.* In your doc’s office, you’ll also be given a test called a glucose challenge, in which you’ll consume 50 grams of sugar. It’s why you get that cup of orange soda, an admittedly nasty concoction called Glucola. If your blood sugar level is higher than 135 mg/dl after an hour, it’s a sign that you’re not clearing glucose fast enough, and you’ll be given a second challenge with 100 grams of sugar.
In this case, after consuming a load of sugar (in a soda or candy bar), your blood sugar will be monitored over three hours. Your goal is to be less than 180 mg/dl in the first hour after eating, less than 165 after two hours, and less than 145 after three hours. If not, your doc will talk to you about the first line of treatment: controlling blood sugar through diet and exercise. If that doesn’t work, she may consider prescribing antidiabetic drugs for you.
and store every excess calorie they can as fat to prepare for future famines. Too many calories condition them to expect overabundance and to indulge in a fat-filled life that comes with all of the fixings that complicate it.
Most times, kids fall in the middle of that bell curve; right in the normal range. That’s why the middle of the baby-weight bell curve is bigger than a septuplets’ grocery bill. But you also need to be aware of what happens when you teeter toward the extreme edges of fetal weight, because that’s when your provider may need to intervene.
To examine these ends of