Healthy Baby Roadmap: Can Preconception Planning Prevent Chronic Illness?

Introduction to Folate and Prenatal Vitamins 0:00

folic acid versus methylfolate. Oh, yes, please. And so, you know, folic acid is synthetic. It's what is added to most prenatal vitamins. It's not a bad thing. I mean, we have reduced the incidence of spina bifida, which is a severe neural tube defect, when we started adding folic acid to prenatals. but folic acid is a synthetic product. It does not exist in nature. The active form of folate, we get folate from food and then in a series of steps we turn it into active folate called methylfolate.

Most really good quality prenatals do not contain folic acid and I do not recommend any folic acid containing prenatals to my clients, only those with methylated active folate. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Hi everybody, it's Dr.

Meet Vicki Koblener and the Healthy Baby Roadmap 0:55

Nancy O'Hara and I am really excited to introduce Vicki Koblener. Vicki and I have worked together for 25 years and she is amazing. She's a registered dietitian, nutritionist, owner of Whole Care Nutrition and Healthy Baby Roadmap and she's passionate about helping children and families live vibrant, healthy lives using functional medicine to maximize their health and reduce their diseases and help kids heal from chronic illness. And our Healthy Baby Roadmap is something we're really going to talk about today because it's designed to help women from preconception through the first year of a baby's life to reduce the child's risk of chronic illness.

All that should've, could've, would've that we've talked about in this podcast. You know, if you have a sister, a niece, a child of your own that is thinking about getting pregnant, I highly recommend reaching out to Vicki. and getting on her program, which is so vital to all of these kids. She works with infants through adulthood with chronic illness, autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, eczema, allergies, tick-borne diseases, ADHD, pans-pandas, autism spectrum, the gamut. And she provides fertility and prenatal nutrition counseling with a real focus on reducing the risk of these chronic illnesses in children.

She's also contributed to several books, including A Compromised Generation, The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America's Children that Beth Lambert was part of and who was on this podcast, and Essential Remedies for Women's Health. She lectures nationally, internationally, all over the place, went to Russia for me many years ago, and she's on the faculty of the Autism Research Institute. and the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs. So, Vicki, thank you so much for being here today and for talking to our listeners.

Thanks, Nancy. It's a pleasure, obviously, always. a pleasure to get this message out. And also just as Nancy said, we've worked together for so many years, we can finish each other's sentences. So this is just like coming home. And I said to Vicki before we started, I wanted to credit her for many of the analogies and the words that I use and that I've used on this podcast talking about two parents and about parents, like using the GPS analogy. So I'm gonna let you say it this time, And then we'll move on to the healthy baby roadmap.

So lots of people probably know this, but many years ago when we were trying to explain to families that were coming to see us and were new to functional medicine and didn't really understand the, you know, it was so overwhelming in many ways, I have started to say to clients, look, think of us like your GPS. You tell us where you want to go. We have the knowledge, the experience, and we can survey the landscape. We can tell you how to get there to the best of our ability. But you are the driver.

You know your child. If you want to move fast, you want to move slow, you know if there is an area where we make a recommendation and it's kind of overwhelming or too much for you to handle, we can reroute you. We can do something else. It's never set in stone. It's never a one size fits all approach. It's really about figuring out how we can be your partner navigating a journey for you. And it was an analogy that a lot of people seem to resonate with. We've had clients tell us that it made them feel so much more comfortable.

And that really is the goal. For any true health care provider, our goal is to help you on your journey. And this is where we start. Yeah. And as I say to people, I may be a little bit pushier Jeep than others, but you are still driving the car. It's a partnership, you know? So tell everybody how you got here.

How Functional Medicine Began 4:50

How did you get to functional medicine? How did you get to all the wonderful things you're doing? Thank you. I got to functional medicine many years ago, longer than I want to admit, but basically it started with an instinct and a child. I had a child who, I mean, and this was well before I knew anything about integrated medicine. I was a very classically trained dietician. I had my second child. By the time he was six months old, he'd had two ear infections. And I kept going to the pediatrician and they kept, they gave him one antibiotics course.

And then they were like back a few months later, here's another one. And I didn't really know anything except that something said to me, this is not right. Something's not quite right here. So I started exploring and this was again, you know, my son's gonna be 27. And you know, I was learning, learning on my own. And I did a few things, including some homeopathy, some herbs and some diet change. And he never had another infection again. And I remember at the time, my husband, we were, you know, very classic.

He was like, what do you mean you're not gonna give him an antibiotic? The doctor said you have to give it. And I said, it just doesn't feel right. This isn't normal. You shouldn't need antibiotics as an infant twice in three months. That started the journey. Then professionally, I was working a lot with GI clients. I did a lot of gastrointestinal work. And at that point, again, 25 years ago, celiac disease was considered a very rare disorder and gluten intolerance was hardly known. And I was working with a gastroenterologist who just happened to be somebody who believed that celiac disease was much more prevalent than we expected.

And he did a lot of testing and he was finding a lot of people with celiac. And I was the dietician that was doing all the gluten-free diets. And in my studies, in my research, I came upon an article that was about gluten and casein-free diets for autism. Again, we're talking 25 years ago, and this is fascinating. So I started looking into it and I found, you know, the internet was not what it is today. It was very hard to find information, but I found some. And I was like this. And then coincidentally, this was so serendipitous.

I discovered this. And then literally about a month later, I had some parenting magazine. And on the cover of the magazine was a headline that said, this mom cured her child with a gluten and casein free diet. I think it was women, I forget which parenting magazine it was. And I was stunned and I thought, wow, you know, this is what I just learned about. How can I find out more? And I remembered that my children had a pediatrician who had always been my favorite pediatrician. And she had left the practice that we were going to, cause she was going off on her own to study and work with children on the spectrum.

I said, I'm going to call this pediatrician because I trusted her. And that was Nancy. That was you, Nancy. And you know it. Yeah. And Nancy said to me, really? You want to work with this? Come work with me. And that was the start of our relationship. But that was also the start of my journey into how nutrition, how diet, how lifestyle, how the non-conventional medical approach, looking at root cause functional medicine can start to heal people. And from there, you know, I've spent decades doing this work.

Things have gotten more and more complicated as our society has gotten more toxic. And that's, and what the thing that brought me to Healthy Baby Roadmap was looking every time Nancy and I would see a client or either of us would see them alone. We always had them fill out a pretty extensive questionnaire. I'm sure many people on this podcast have done those questionnaires. And it would always talk about what was the birth history? What was the first year of life? What was this? Tell me about this.

And we would look for clues. We would use that to say, well, this was a C-section birth. This was a child who had a lot of antibiotics. This was a mom who had gestational diabetes. Those are possible predictors. And I finally said to myself, why am I, the cart is, you know, the horse is out of the barn. Why am I not helping people before they get pregnant so that they know these are the things you can do to reduce your risk before you get pregnant, as opposed to waiting until the baby's born when we could have looked at these risk factors.

And that's basically where Healthy Baby Roadmap was born.

Preconception Nutrition and Environmental Exposures 9:20

And all the data continues to pile up this is something we can do. Now, of course, Nancy, there's no guarantees. I can never promise somebody I'm going to make sure their child never has a chronic illness. But what we can do is reduce risk. And the other thing that's so important about it is we can empower. How many moms do we know that say, I wish I had known, I wish I had done something differently? You can do all those things so that even if something doesn't go the way you'd hoped, you know that you did what you could and you were well informed and you were able to reduce the risk as much as possible.

So I think it's an empowering program for women, for future mothers. I think it's an important program for future mothers. And I would love to see it as part of the standard of care. Yeah, me too, absolutely. And in all of that, I always tell people, except for the initials behind our names, you have done so much in our practice. You have done so much in your own practice and in other practices that you work in to help families be healthier. And when we talk about the first thousand days of life, that starts Pre-birth, that's not starting day one of birth.

That's starting in the womb and before. And we really need to impact that. And so tell us what the program looks like. Why is it different from a typical prenatal guidance program? Thank you for asking that because there are many great pregnancy programs out there. Most of them are really focused on how to have a healthy pregnancy. And by that, we mean a successful pregnancy that leads to a term birth, no preeclampsia, no hypertension, no preterm birth, things like that. And that's important, but.

Absolutely. Yeah. And again, there's a lot of correlation between those things and chronic illness in children after the fact. But the, but what it doesn't look at is where was the root cause and what can you do to change the terrain? So one of the things, and I stole this from somebody many, many years ago. So, and I freely admit that I told her I was borrowing it for borrowing versus stolen, but I remember somebody saying to me once, every mother, every father, the parents, when you think about them and have a baby, you start thinking about the nursery.

I'm going to decorate the nursery and it's going to be pink or green or blue and I'm going to have this mobile. But your womb is your baby's first home. How much time do we actually spend getting our womb ready? generally not much. And the truth is, optimal health during pregnancy supports the development of the baby, supports a healthy child, a strong immune system, digestive system, detoxification system, but that healthy pregnancy starts with setting that foundation before you get pregnant. So healthy baby roadmap, and I call it HBR just because it's easier, but we look at or we look at basically a number of different areas, diet.

Do you have enough nutrients in the diet? Are there, and we always talk about what is there too much of, what is there too little of? This is a very common theme in functional nutrition. What do we know there's very little of or often not enough of in pregnancy? Vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, but, and I'll give you a few pearls, iodine. And one of the things that's super critical, and I'm seeing this more and more, we who are more aware of health and nutrition often move away from iodized salt because we're using Himalayan sea salt or Celtic sea salt or natural salts from the ocean.

They don't have a lot of iodine. What we're seeing is when there's not enough iodine, the thyroid begins to be affected. And iodine is critical for fetal development. So I am very, very focused. That's one of the things I look at. I'm very, very focused on making sure that women are getting enough iodine in their diet before and during their pregnancy. But that's only one of many nutrients. Another one I talk a lot about is choline. Choline is dominantly found in eggs. There's actually data that shows that choline deficiency is linked, correlated to increased risk of schizophrenia.

And the issue with that is that choline does its great work in the first trimester. So you may not even know you're pregnant. By taking proactive steps before you become pregnant in that preconception period saying, I'm gonna start six months, a year is great, six months is usually pretty darn good. I'm gonna start to get my body ready now so that if I get, if and when I get pregnant, I am not them behind the ape while trying to figure out how to make things better. You've gotten your choline in.

And even though eggs are one of the best sources of choline, we have a difficult time meeting our choline needs with food alone. And there are different types of choline, some better than others, different products better than others. So I'm very specific about that. But iodine, choline, two nutrients that most parents that I talk to have no idea about, and are really, really important in addition to the ones like zinc, magnesium, selenium, iron, all the good stuff like that. But then there's also the environment.

What's happening in our environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we consume, it's not only are we getting those right nutrients, but what's coming in that package with the food. Are there lots of plasticizers in the packaging we use? And the data on the role of environmental toxins, things like carbons, phthalates, PFOAs, all of these different letters and acronyms and words we hear that are hard to pronounce have clearly documented effects on fetal development, on hormone health, on obesity in children, and many, many other impacts on gut health.

looking at things like organic versus non-organic food, all of those play a role. So I do a pretty deep dive in a first visit of let's walk through where are the sources of toxins in your day? What can we do to ameliorate some of those? And I wanna be clear, people can walk away from this and feel I'm crushing mountain of obligation and like, oh my God, there's just so much stuff here I'll never be able to do. I always tell clients, we break it down. This is why we start six months early. We do a little bit at a time.

You may not do everything. Nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. But if you do 20% of the things, if we look at the list and say, well, here's 40 things, let's pick three, that much better for having picked those three. And we talk about it here all the time about just taking a step, whatever that may be. And the other thing I wanted to mention as you're talking, those who have been listening or watching the podcast may have seen one with Dr. Alyssa Song. And what she's saying about, we need to nourish the gut, give the good things, is the same thing Vicki's saying as far as during pregnancy, the choline, the good nutrients and then also what do we need to take away?

What do we need to remove? You know, the, the toxicants, the plasticizers, all of those sorts of things. It's the same thing we're talking about in our children that you're talking about starting even before that while that child is living in their first home.

Water, Food Choices, and Pregnancy Support 17:20

I mean, I think that's so important thinking about that womb as the first home. Absolutely. And to Alyssa's point, The gut is so important and we know this, the data is incontrovertible on how important good gut health is. So I wanna look at mom's gut health again, before she's pregnant, because one of the things that comes into play, I didn't choose the easiest area to concentrate on because once somebody's pregnant, your toolkit of interventions is very, very limited. From a prescriptive standpoint, There's so many things that are just recommended that I don't necessarily know are really ideal, but when it comes to things like herbs, supplements, you really have, you're really very prescribed in what you can do.

So for example, many of the common herbs we use for gut health, berberine, oregano, oil of oregano in these therapeutic doses are contraindicated in pregnancy. So what we can do, it is better to know and address before you get pregnant than wait till you're pregnant to try to ameliorate a problem that may have existed previous, which is another reason why I like to get about, you know, grab somebody around six months. There are things you can do always. I mean, I have clients who call me when they're in their eighth month of pregnancy.

There's still things we can do, you know, but in that perfect world, the other thing very critical and a cornerstone of this is what kind of birth control was mom using. So any woman who's been on oral contraceptives is going to have been affected by them in a variety of ways. And it is important to get off the oral contraceptives, use a different form of birth control for a while to let your hormones reestablish themselves in a consistent way and help me to identify if we actually have a regular menses or not.

But the other thing is oral contraceptives deplete B vitamins. And B vitamins are absolutely critical. And you'll hear this over and over. I'm sure many of your listeners know this. They're critical for neurologic development. They're critical for mood. And when you start a pregnancy, depleted in B vitamins, you're starting at a deficit. So getting off those oral contraceptives will help us. Number one, I also find this a lot. I get this a lot. People who, I was put on birth control pills for my acne or for my mood or for this or for that.

Again, what that means is that somebody didn't care enough to look at why were your hormones dysregulated? All they did was, basically superimpose hormonal hormones on top of it, but haven't looked at the root cause of why the hormones were imbalanced. And then often, when a woman wants to get pregnant, she comes off the birth control expecting she's going to have a regular period. And it takes months to even years to realize that our hormones were always dysregulated. And now we have to do that, that re-regulation work.

So it's important for women to realize that it may not be as simple as coming off contraception, oral contraception, but hormonal, but you want to number one, replete the nutrients. And you also want to really reestablish a good period. Right, right. And what you're really talking about is one of the things our mentor always talked about, sort of the name it, blame it, tame it. You have acne, so let's tame it with a birth control pill. But really, what's the root cause? What was underneath that?

It's not that there was anything wrong in doing that, but it may tell us more about problems you may have getting pregnant or things that you're dealing with that may affect your unborn child. Right. 100%. Yeah. So we talked about iodine. We talked about choline. You talked about the nourishing plus the removal. Are there three or four or one or two other things that you advise women to know about or do before or during? way more than three or four. I know, but I don't want to give it all away. We have to get them to do the whole roadmap with you, but maybe just a few more.

For example, and I don't get into specifics about different brands and things like that on these podcasts, but for sure, I have so many clients, I'll say to them, are you filtering your water? Water is the craziest thing. we put so much garbage in our water. Our water has, you know, the regular water supply has fluoride, it has chlorine. And we think of those things as good things, but they were actually not meant to be ingested the way they are. They serve a certain purpose in a certain way, but not really the way they're being used now.

And then our water supply is filled with medication. People flush their medication down the toilet and it goes into the public water supply. It's filled with microbes. It's filled with chemicals and plasticizers and pesticides. And so when I say to somebody, do you filter your water? And they'll say, absolutely, my fridge filter. The fridge filter is filtering this much of what we want. There are many not hardly expensive filters. But we want to know which ones are the good ones and which ones are the not so good ones.

We want ones that will filter out the live organisms, the chemicals, the pesticides, the medications, the minerals, not all minerals, some minerals. And the other thing is, this is a little pearl, but I do have clients who will tell me, oh, I got a reverse osmosis system, my whole house, it's fantastic. But they're actually not, no one told them they have to remineralize their water. Oh, that's a big one. Yes. So they're not getting there. They're lacking in minerals because nobody ever told them that when you, when you do reverse osmosis, not a bad system, but you have to remineralize your water.

Right. So water's huge. The other thing I like to talk to families a lot about is Eggs, one of my favorite foods unless there's a major problem with it. But again, we've got this mentality that somehow eggs are bad. Eggs are a fertility food. Eggs are the symbol of fertility and they are rich in choline and they're rich in vitamin A and some vitamin D and they have all these other nutrients that are really critical for pregnancy. So I'm a big fan of eating eggs as long as there's no frank allergy to it.

The other thing that women are very confused about is fish. Some women try to avoid fish during pregnancy, but we really wanna eat fish. Fish is another really healthy pregnancy food, but you have to know which ones. The fatty fish, the ones that are low in mercury, and so I give lists of those. And there are some pretty, National Resource Defense Council and the Monterey Bay Aquarium have fabulous lists on where to find your healthiest fish. But I find a lot of moms are just frightened of fish.

And it's really important to talk about the fact that really, for a healthy pregnancy, you wanna have fish a couple of times a week and which kinds. And then there's the whole, the organ meat thing, traditional cultures. And this is a little scary when I don't, and this is where the roadmap comes, the GPS.

Birth Planning, C-Sections, and Microbiome Seeding 24:50

I don't make anybody liver if they don't want to. I help people to understand how you can eat organ meats because organ meats only from pasture fed animals, Because the liver is the detox organ. You eat a liver from a sick animal, not great. Liver from a pasture fed animal is actually so rich in fetal supporting nutrients. Liver, fish roe, things like that have been used as fertility foods in most cultures for millennia. So even things like that, we talk about how to get a little bit of that in, how to support your natural fertility, your natural robustness so the baby can grow.

Lots of lifestyle, sleep, stress, all of that matters. And even, you know, these are a few pearls, but it's not just about getting pregnant. But then when we go through the nine months of pregnancy, this is one of my favorite examples. Two things that are very important for me, glucose tolerance testing. Now the standard here for glucose tolerance testing is glucose, which contains brominated vegetable oil, which was just banned. So we have something we've been giving to pregnant women for years that actually is considered toxic.

And we give it in it. And I actually had a client, this was very upsetting to me. I had a client about six months ago and I give a whole explanation of what are your alternatives. Here's a list, bring it to your doctor, tell them you don't want to take the collie. You want to take something else that can support your glucose tolerance test. And the doctor basically said. Glucola or nothing. it will not allow you to do anything else, which again, from an evidence-based perspective, doesn't really make a lot of sense.

There's actually even a product that's designed to replace glu-cola that is organic that you can use, but even things like banana and juice and jelly beans, like organic jelly beans, like they, as long as you get your proper sugar load, you should be able to do the test fine without having to take glu-cola. The other issue I find is very healthy moms tend to have they don't eat these high doses of sugar. So when they do the test, they will fail because it's such a high influx of glucose. I mean, they fail the test.

And the doctor says either you need to go on insulin or you need, you know, or something, you know, there's all kinds of issues being put on insulin is, you know, the one we really want to avoid. But bottom line is I also walk moms through, okay, this is what's going to happen. If you get this result, this is what we're going to do about it. Don't immediately jump. Yeah. You know, assuming you have gestational diabetes because you very well may not. Right. And then I do a birth plan. We have a big session about a month and a half before birth where we talk about the birth plan.

What can you expect from your delivery? What can you expect from the process and what can you advocate for for yourself? And again, it's not about do it my way. It's do you want to delay the cord cutting? Do you not? These are the benefits. These are the things you might not want to do. Right. Eat before. And a lot of birthing centers are now much better about things like letting women eat, letting them walk around, but they're still not always on the table for everybody. So simple things like that.

So we talk about a laundry list of. what do you want your delivery to look like in a perfect world? And obviously, if there are outcomes where it wasn't the expected delivery, you have to deal with those. But for example, you may not plan for C-section birth. If you have one, let's plan in advance. If you end up having a C-section, what can we do about it? How do we help mom and baby have a more productive outcome post-section. Because you and I know that C-section births are correlated with poor gut health in infants and more chronic diseases.

Right, including diabetes, autism, so many. And one of the things, maybe just, I mean, there's so many things I want to unpack out of what you said, but just going on that birth and the C-section, you know, one of the things that Yehuda Schoenfeld and others that you and I have talked about is that perineal picnic. Can you talk about that just a little bit for families, what that means? So when babies are born, and again, you know, I roll my eyes a little bit at certain things that are considered very traditional.

but don't always make logical sense. But when babies are born, they come through the birth canal. When moms are filled with bacteria, our vaginas, our anuses, our gut, filled with bacteria, baby comes through the birth canal, baby actually has a pristine gut. But as they come through the birth canal, they get bacteria all over themselves and they actually swallow some. That is the beginning of their own microbiome. You know this. So they start their microbiome by coming through the birth canal. If you're born via C-section, no birth canal, no vaginal microbiome, gut microbiome, what you're actually exposed to is the hospital microbiome and the skin microbiome.

And we see that babies that are born via C-section have a different microbiome than kids that are born vaginally and more prone to atopy, allergy, eczema, developmental delay, et cetera. what we had, what perineal picnic, also called vaginal seeding. What I recommend for women, and I tell them this very clearly, you know, the standard is you ask your physician if they will allow it. A lot of them are constrained by hospital policy, but bottom line, a gauze pad. And again, for a lot of women, this sounds so overwhelming.

And I want everything and do what you want to do. You don't have to do it if you don't want, but you take a gauze pad, you insert it in the vagina. And then when the baby's born, you wipe it all over them. You want to basically reseed them. And it's a simple thing to do. And it can be very effective. But knowing in advance, these are the things I would like to do to not have a C-section. But if I have one, I'm going to feel better because I did X, Y, or Z.

Fertility, Mitochondria, and Key Supplements 31:05

Yep. Just being prepared. Empowering women, preparing women and dads. Dads do play a role here. Yeah. And that's the other thing about the healthy baby roadmap is also dads being involved. You know, if you're going through infertility, looking at dad's zinc levels, for example, right? Yeah. And mitochondria. So we haven't really talked about that, but I know, you know, we talk about that all the time in terms of kids with neurodevelopmental delays and chronic illness, but the mitochondria are crucial for fetal development and for egg production, egg quality and egg implantation.

into the endometrium. So for example, CoQ10 is pretty regularly recommended for women who are struggling with fertility, as well as a number of other nutrients and supportive elements. But CoQ10 is a key one. And for dads and moms, getting more energy into that sperm, getting more energy into the egg can make for a more robust Yeah, so absolutely. There's so much we can do before we have to go straight to assisted reproduction. There's so much we can do before babies are born to help. Basically, it's just let's move the needle to this side instead of this side.

There's no guarantees. There's no 100% since parents aren't expected to be 100%, but you can move that needle. Yeah. And so much of what you're talking about, although it is great for women that are becoming pregnant and being pregnant, it's also great for people who are not in that space to hear these things. I mean, polling is great for the brain in general. So eggs, as long as you're not allergic or sensitive to them, are great for our kids with Pan's Pandas. Liver, there's studies that show that liver decreases ticks.

And I found great ways to use it, you know, wrapping it in bacon and all of those sort of things. But so much of this is pertinent to people who already have children that may be going through Pan's Pandas or other chronic illnesses. Right. And the one thing we didn't talk about, I know we're wrapping up a bit, but the one thing we didn't talk about, which is so obvious and so big, um, folic acid versus methylfolate. Oh yes, please. And so, you know, folic acid is synthetic. It's what is added to most prenatal vitamins.

It's not a bad thing. I mean, we have reduced the incidence of spina bifida, which is a severe neural tube defect. When we started adding folic acid to prenatals. but folic acid is a synthetic product. It does not exist in nature. The active form of folate, we get folate from food. And then in a series of steps, we turn it into active folate called methylfolate. Most really good quality prenatals do not contain folic acid. And I do not recommend any folic acid containing prenatals to my clients, only those with methylated active folate.

And there are studies that show that pregnant women who take prenatal vitamins with folic acid have an increase in something called UMF, which is unmethylated folic acid in their bloodstream, which can send some wrong messages to the body kind of saying, well, we already have enough folates. You really don't need more. You don't really need to use this. Whereas the active folate is better utilized. And we know, again, methylfolate is correlated. It's necessary for reeking neurotransmitters. It's necessary for detoxification.

Lack of active folate is correlated with neurodevelopmental delays. So all of that matters. Yeah, yeah. And one other, you mentioned about fish, but one of the things we get from some of our good fatty fishes, the ones that are safe, are essential fatty acids. What about that in pregnancy and for our kids? 100%. So we know in pregnancy, the recommendation is about 300 milligrams of DHA. DHA is one type of essential fatty acid. The two most commonly known are EPA and DHA. But EPA is actually the more anti-inflammatory.

DHA is really important for cognitive development. So you wanna get that DHA in early and in good quantities, but a lot of people don't, they focus too much on the DHA. and they don't add enough of the EPA. So getting it from fatty fish is fantastic, but I often add some additional good quality fish oil and fish oil can be contaminated with mercury and PCB.

Folic Acid vs Methylfolate and Omega-3s 35:45

So you really wanna know your source, but anti-inflammatory, brain supportive, pregnancy supportive. So yeah, fish oil is critical. And that's part of my core list of supplements that I recommend for pregnant women, and that includes things like a good quality prenatal, also vitamin D, because most of us are low in vitamin D, and that vitamin D is correlated with so many improved pregnancy outcomes when you support, and deficiency is correlated with so many poorer pregnancy outcomes. But vitamin D, good prenatal with methylfolate, omega-3s, choline, possibly a probiotic, really depends.

number of different things. And really, again, depending on what a particular woman's history is, that's when we will add some other things. Right. And plus, as you said, the good diet that's full of many of these things and removing the things that may be endotoxic or otherwise toxic to the system. Absolutely. Soaky. Soaky. Yeah, absolutely. So, Vicki, you know, you are a wealth of information, not just for moms going on this healthy baby roadmap, but for all of our children. And you've given me so much good advice over the years.

I want to thank you for that, really, from the bottom of my heart. But if a mom or a dad or a grandma or anybody wants to reach you, how do they find you these days? The best way to find me and mutual admiration society over here, obviously not enough said, but the way to find me is whole care nutrition. And I have to spell it because everybody spells it wrong. When I chose the name, it was supposed to be based on holistic nutrition, but somehow everybody thinks it's either a hole in the wall or something.

Basically it's H O A H O L H O L as in holistic. And then nutrition, H-O-L-N-U-T-R-I-T-I-O-N wholecarenutrition.com. So did I say it right? I think I messed it up. You said it wrong. It's wholecare. Wholecarenutrition.com. Right. Right. That's why they have trouble. You can't even do it. I can't even spell it. H-O-L-C-A-R-E nutrition.com. And there's a button to press. There's actually one of the web pages is specific to Healthy Baby Roadmap. So if you want to talk to me about one of your children or yourself, that's great.

If you want to talk about Healthy Baby Roadmap, there's actually a specific button you can press for that. And any of all of those are vital. I mean, I think, you know, Vicki really has a lot to offer. And as many of you know, who may be trying to get that long awaited appointment with me, what I always ask you to do is see Vicki first. because there's so much that she can do in helping you, not just with your diet, not just with your supplements, but the whole lifestyle,

Finding Vicki and Final Advice 38:45

sleep, all of that, that is so vital to all of our health. And ordering functional medicine lab work, which I do for my pregnant, you know, the moms that I'm working with as well as other people. So we can get some of that started so that when they need to see you, they've got the results of the work as opposed to, starting from scratch. Absolutely. Absolutely. Any last words of, of wisdom or hope or, or anything you want to leave our listeners and viewers with? 10 years from now, I wish every woman would be doing this and we could see statistical declines in all these chronic illnesses.

But I really just want moms to know and dads that they do have power and they can affect change. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It does not have to be overwhelming. Small, simple steps incrementally can have powerful effects. Absolutely. So well said, as always. Thank you. Thank you again for joining me. Thanks for doing all the work that you do, and I'll see you again soon. All right. I'll talk to you soon. Take care, everybody, and thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning into Doctor Talks.

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