As a pregnant or lactating mom, your baby’s cell structure and brain rely on the fats you eat in your diet.  Plenty of evidence suggests that a pregnant mom should increase high-quality saturated fats like butter, completely remove hydrogenated fats like margarine and shortening, and even reduce polyunsaturated fats like soy, corn, safflower, and canola oils.  If these claims for saturated fats and against vegetable fats don’t quite fit into your current perception of fat, you must keep reading.  As it turns out, the right fats may be the biggest missing ingredients in your baby’s body.

What kind of health would you expect to find in a culture that has replaced its use of saturated fats, like butter and lard, for high amounts of vegetable oil, like corn and canola?  Based on television commercials and news reports, most would easily guess that this culture would be growing healthier every year.  It may, then, be difficult to understand how since 1920, America has quickly become a center for chronic disease, boasting health statistics like “the second worst newborn death rate in the developed world.”  Why might today’s babies be so unfit for life?  Could this have anything to do with telling moms to remove high-quality fats from their diets?

Today, a pregnant mom is likely to use refined polyunsaturated vegetable fats including oils of soy, corn, safflower, and canola.  Just a hundred years ago, however, her choice of fats would have been very different.  According to nutrition researchers Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, fats were either saturated or monounsaturated, primarily from lard, tallows, coconut oil, and small amounts of olive oil.  In fact, there are many healthy cultures around the world that have eaten primarily high quality saturated fats.

In the 1930’s, Doctor Westin Price traveled the globe to learn how healthy populations were eating.  He found populations that ate high amounts of saturated fats and no refined polyunsaturated fats all enjoyed superb health and were able to produce healthy children with ease, generation after generation.  What’s going on?

Animal fats that contain saturated fat and cholesterol are essential for your baby’s growth.  Half of every one of your growing baby’s cell membranes is made of saturated fat and cholesterol say Fallon and Enig. 

Their cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, provides a wealth of information to for the natural minded mom.

Saturated fat is required for your baby to incorporate calcium into his or her growing skeleton, say Fallon and Enig.  They also write that saturated fats help your liver detoxify contaminants that could be harmful to your baby.  Saturated fats also enhance your immune system and protect you against harmful microorganisms in your digestive tract. 

Cholesterol is a precursor to reproductive hormones which undergo so many changes during pregnancy and lactation.  It is also a precursor to Vitamin D, also involved in growing your baby.  Without cholesterol, cell walls lose their stiffness and become flabby say Fallon and Enig.  Nourishing Traditions reports, “Babies and children need cholesterol-rich foods throughout their growing years to ensure proper development of the brain and nervous system.”

Experiencing typical pregnancy discomfort?  Cholesterol is needed for proper function of your body’s natural “feel good” chemical, serotonin, writes Fallon and Enig.  Feel like food sits in your tummy all day or experiencing pregnancy heartburn?  Cholesterol is necessary to produces digestive juices that might help these common pregnancy discomforts.  Remember, your body will always send cholesterol to your baby’s needs first.  If you don’t have enough for your own needs, you may feel digestive problems, especially as you become depleted in the third trimester. Cholesterol also protects against free radical damage. 

Did you know that your breast milk contains mostly saturated fat and has a higher proportion of cholesterol than almost any other food?  If you don’t eat it, how will your baby receive it?  These are vital to the health of your unborn baby and to the health of your breastfeeding baby.  You must eat high quality animal fats in order to pass them to your growing baby.  And be careful with commercial infant formulas.  They are low in saturated fats and soy formulas are completely devoid of cholesterol, Fallon and Enig report.  They also mention a study linking lowfat diets with failure to thrive in children.  Mom, this means that you should eat plenty of high quality animal fats.  

You also might not know that your body actually produces cholesterol in order to protect against cellular damage?  Cellular damage can occur from eating refined sugar, flour, or other refined food products that cause huge blood sugar swings inside your body.  Nourishing Traditions likens this to your personal police force that waits for crime to occur.  In this case, the crime is ingesting processed and refined foods.  Your police force is always present at the scene of the crime, but is hardly the culprit.  Your cholesterol is trying to help heal damaged cell membranes.  The real question is, “What’s causing the damage?”

Amazingly, “healthy oils” like polyunsaturated soy, corn, safflower, and canola may be leading culprits.  One reason the polyunsaturated fats cause so many health problems, say Fallon and Enig, is that they tend to become oxidized or rancid when subjected to heat, oxygen, and moisture as in cooking and processing.  Rancid oils contain free radicals that can attack cell membranes and red blood cells, and can cause mutations in tissues.  Free radicals are an acknowledged factor behind cancers, diseases, and overall aging.  Remember, these refined oils were not widely used until the last hundred years, and were never used for cooking.  In the past, extraction of plant oils was performed by stone press.  Pressing the oil helps it to retain many healthful properties.  Today, seeds are crushed, heated to 230 F, squeezed under tremendous pressure, and exposed to large amounts of light and oxygen, all of which cause foods to lose nutrients.  Then, in attempts to extract the last bits of oil, chemical solvents are added.  High temperatures are what create free radicals as well as destroy vitamins that may otherwise protect against this damage.  Finally, chemical preservatives BHT and BHA are added, even though many references point to possible side effects, including cancer and brain damage, say Fallon and Enig.  Nourishing Traditions recommends searching for expeller-expressed unrefined oils instead.

Hydrogenation is the process that creates trans fats and is the worst option of all for the pregnant or lactating mom who wants to build a strong baby.  “Trans” refers to the shape of the fat molecule under a microscope.  “Cis” refers to the shape of most things naturally occurring in nature, including fats before they are hydrogenised.  Fallon and Enig say these man-made trans fats are toxins to the body, but unfortunately your digestive system does not recognize them as such.  Instead of quickly eliminating them, your body incorporates trans fats into your cell membranes replacing the “cis” fats.  This, of course, includes all the cells you make, including the cells of your baby.  Does this mean some babies are being born partially-hydrogenated?  Other than the utter non-naturalness of this arrangement, Fallon and Enig say the trans fats wreak havoc with your cells because chemical reactions cannot take place effectively when molecular alignment has been altered.  Nourishing Traditions sites research that hydrogenated fats are associated with a host of serious breakdowns in the body, including low birth weight babies, birth defects, and difficulty in lactation.  The pregnant woman’s best bet is to avoid these fats at least while building her baby.

So now you know that a pregnant woman has very good reason to avoid foods using plant oils or hydrogenated oils while including foods that contain saturated fats and cholesterol.  But, unfortunately, it may not be so simple.  It is tremendously important that you eat high quality versions of saturated fats and cholesterol.

None of the healthy populations studied by Doctor Price ate saturated fat from cake and cookies, for example.  They also didn’t eat pasteurized dairy or deli meats.  They ate fresh meats and dairy from grass-fed animals and the dairy was not pasteurized.  Pasteurization destroys much of the valuable nutrition inside dairy foods.  Fresh meats of these healthy child-bearing cultures did not have hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, or flavorings added.  They were simple, they were from nature. 

Foods with healthy fat to ask for at your local health food store:

¬Fresh grass-fed meats—Local farm and organic are best, but grass-fed is key for the right nutrients composition; try to avoid hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, and other flavorings)

¬Fresh grass-fed organ meats—Organ meats, like liver, were highly prized by wise and healthy cultures and saved specifically for pregnant women.  Again, local farm organic are best, but grass fed is key.

¬Wild fish, preferably from clean waters like Alaska—Farm raised fish do not have the right fatty acid profile.

¬Raw butter—Also considered a Superfood by these healthy cultures. Try to find unpasteurized and grass-fed.

¬Eggs—Also considered a superfood for pregnant women.  Chickens that are free range and able to eat bugs will produce the most nutrient rich egg yolks.

Cook with:

¬Butter

¬Lard (pork fat)

¬Duck, goose, and chicken fat

¬Beef tallow

¬Coconut oil

¬Palm oil

Use liberally, but avoid cooking:

¬Olive oil