Whether your goal is great health, delivering a ‘Super Baby,’ or being a lean, sexy pregnant woman, the last diet you’ll ever need is quite simple:  Eat unprocessed foods.  Not only does this make intuitive sense to most, but unprocessed foods have always been consumed by the healthiest and leanest cultures around the world.  So what are healthy unprocessed foods and how can you make a few simple switches to stay lean and optimize the health of your unborn baby?

In general, unprocessed “true-foods” are foods that have not been altered, refined, packaged, boxed, canned, heated, or molecularly separated.  If you can pick it off a tree or drag it home from the field, you likely have a whole, unprocessed true-food.  Unprocessed foods include fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, meats, fish, legumes, dried beans, eggs, aged cheeses, raw dairy, potatoes, brown rice, and other whole grains. 

To determine if your food is whole, simply look at the ingredient list.  For example, if you buy a box of rice that contains only the ingredient “whole brown rice,” or if your packaged nuts display the ingredient “raw almonds,” you have a whole unprocessed true-food.  Cereal, on the other hand is not.  If you look at the ingredients, you will usually find processed flour, sugar, and various additives and flavorings.

These are highly processed foods.  Notice how you can “pick” brown rice or nuts in their natural form, but you will never find a tree or plant that produces “Cheerios” or “natural flavorings”. 

There are two primary reasons why typical processed foods make it very difficult for you to look great or remain healthy.  First, processed foods simply do not have the nutrients of their unprocessed true-food counterparts.  For example, wheat (which can be harvested from nature) contains 16 minerals, 11 vitamins, enzymes, thousands of co-vitamins, and potentially infinite additional nutrients that modern science has yet to discover.  It is a true-food.  However, whole-grain wheat breads, pastas, and cereals are actually made from processed wheat flour, not real wheat.  Real wheat and powdered flour are two very different foods (Figure 1).

Figure 1:  Unprocessed wheat as it is found in nature and processed wheat (flour) as most people eat it today.

It is no secret that processed foods are significantly less nutritious than unprocessed true-foods.  The United States government actually requires food manufacturers to add vitamins in order to prevent the diseases that first occurred due to the refining of wheat.  Despite losing the majority of their nutritional value, however, food manufacturers add back only 3 synthetic vitamins and iron.    Ironically, the food manufacturers are able to advertise a false sense of health on the package, describing these foods as “enriched.”

It may be unlikely, if not altogether impossible, to create a Super Baby or have a symptom-free pregnancy eating processed foods.  Doctor Westin Price traveled the world looking for the healthiest populations who created “generation after generation” of healthy children.  He found fourteen different populations that exemplified “near perfect” health and all fourteen displayed one single characteristic:  they ate foods in their natural, unprocessed form.  Doctor Price is joined by many natural-minded nutritionists and holistic health coaches who see the subtle destruction that processed foods have caused, including many new chronic children’s diseases.  As successive attempts to eat different versions of the same processed-food diets work against your body’s natural intelligence and instinct, it becomes a dietary battle that cannot be won and is made evident by today’s escalating rates of childhood diseases as well as pregnancy discomforts.

A reason why processed foods may be so detrimental is because the constituents of these foods are often viewed as toxins by your body.  In his book, Eat, Move, and Be Healthy, Chek calls this processed-food condition “toxic bowel.”  In Food Allergies and Food Intolerance, Doctor Jonathan Brostoff, declares that the person who eats an average diet is likely to ingest and at least 200 different synthetic chemicals every day.  Especially when processed foods are combined with flavorings and colorings, a once-nutritive food becomes a non-food that must instead be detoxified.  One of the foundation principles of Eat, Move, and Be Healthy is to avoid toxic processed foods in order to maintain a healthy low body fat as well as to maintain the highest level of health possible.

Only in the last 70 years have processed foods replaced Mother Nature’s true foods.  Could it only be a coincidence that the last 70 years has also shown a dramatic and unprecedented worldwide rise in chronic disease and obesity?  For creating a ‘Super Baby’ and staying a lean, sexy pregnant mom, there is no comparison:  unprocessed true-foods are superior to processed foods.

Here are a few simple switches that will help you improve your nutrition, avoid cravings, and create healthy offspring “generation after generation.”

From Processed:To Unprocessed:

Deli Meats-------------Fresh Meats

Roasted Nuts----------Raw Nuts

Pasteurized Cheese---Aged, unpasteurized cheese

Bread------------------Sprouted Grain Bread

Pasta & Couscous------Barley & Quinoa

Cereal-----------------Oats + Raw Honey (+nuts & dried fruit)

Cookies---------------  Mix Oats + Eggs + Raisins + Honey

Canned vegetables & fruitFresh or frozen vegetables & fruit

Pasteurized milk & yogurtUnpasteurized milk & yogurt

Breaded fish----------Fresh fish + herbs & spices

Table salt-------------Gray sea salt

Sugar-----------------Raw Honey or Raw Agave or Stevia