The Better Baby Book: How to Have a Healthier, Smarter, Happier Baby

251 Pages·2013·1.74 MB·English

by  Lana Asprey

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Part One: The Better Baby Plan

Chapter 1: You Are a Cocreator: The Better Baby Plan

What Happens at Conception
Sending Your Baby Growth-Mode Messages
The Power of Epigenetics: Our DNA Is Not Set in Stone
More on Growth Mode and Defense Mode

Chapter 2: Road Map to a Healthy Pregnancy

Eat the Right Foods
Take the Right Supplements
Detoxify Your Body before, during, and after Pregnancy
Minimize Stress
Comparing Your Baby to Others
Before We Continue

Part Two: The Better Baby Diet

Chapter 3: Better Baby Building Blocks

What Bodies Are Made Of
What Brains Are Made Of
What Bodies Are Not Made Of

Chapter 4: What Not to Eat

Fried or Overcooked Food
Genetically Modified Foods
Unhealthy Fats
Sugar and Excess Carbohydrates
Chemical Flavor Enhancers
Most Grains
Yeast
Mushrooms
Pasteurized, Homogenized, or Conventional Dairy
(Except Butter)
Caffeine and Decaffeinated Products
Garlic and Onions
Most Seafood
Cured and Precooked Meats
Certain Herbs
Canned Food
Old Food
Conventional Produce
Foods with Added Chemicals or Conditioners
Processed Foods

Chapter 5: Nourishing a Healthy Brain and Body

The Food Pyramid
Eggs
Coconut
Olives and Olive Oil
Meat and Butter from Grass-Fed Animals
Low-Mercury Fish
Vegetables and Low-Sugar Fruits
Nourishing Nuts
Collagen Keeps It All Together

The Only Good Soy Is Soy Lecithin
Cilantro
Ginger
White Rice
Whey Protein
Xylitol and Stevia
Dark Chocolate and Cocoa Butter
The Better Baby Book Nutrition Guidelines

Chapter 6: Fertility

L-Arginine and L-Ornithine
The Truth about Oral Contraceptives
The Importance of a Healthy Thyroid
Sickness and Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Fertility Treatment: Not Just for Women
Sex for Pregnancy

Chapter 7: Your Prenatal Supplement Regimen

How to Tell if a Supplement Is Useful and Safe
The Myth of a Prenatal Supplement
Multivitamins
Essential Vitamins
Essential Minerals
Probiotics
Krill or Fish Oil
Brain Nutrients
Antioxidants

Chapter 8: Hormones and Pharmaceuticals

Progesterone
Deprenyl
Oxiracetam
A Warning about Pharmaceuticals

Part Three: The Toxin Connection

Chapter 9: How Mold Changes Your Pregnancy

Toxins in Food
Types of Mycotoxins
Locations of Mycotoxins

Chapter 10: Environmental Toxins

Air Pollutants
Water Pollutants
Electromagnetic Fields

Chapter 11: Endotoxins: The Toxins Produced inside You

Chapter 12: How to Deal with Toxins

Activated Charcoal
Bentonite Clay
Chlorella
Cholestyramine
Drugs versus Supplements
Morning Sickness and Toxins

Part Four: Preparing for Pregnancy and Birth

Chapter 13: Detoxifying Your Body and Your Home

The Better Baby Diet
Heavy Metals and Chelation
Rejuvenating Your Liver
Detoxifying Your Home
Do Your Best

Chapter 14: Autism

Possible Causes of Autism
Heavy Metals

Age
Toxins
GI Tract Imbalance
Vitamin D3 Deficiency
Keep Up with the Information

Chapter 15: Reducing Stress for an Easier and Better Pregnancy

Stress and Fertility
Stress and Pregnancy
Where Does Stress Come From?
What to Do about Stress
Sleep
Exercise
Breathing Techniques (Pranayama)
Meditation
Heart Rate Variability Training
Dealing with Travel
Addressing Jaw Tension
Lighting

Chapter 16: Does Intention Matter?

Chapter 17: The Best Way to Welcome Baby: A Gentle Birth

A Mother's Eyes
Self-Attachment
The Umbilical Cord
Water Birth
Caesarean Section
Home Birth: At Least as Safe as Hospital Birth
The Issue of Hospital Birth
Planning Birth at Home or in the Hospital
A European Perspective on Birth
Planning a Vaginal Birth after a Caesarian

Nursing
Vaccines

Chapter 18: Bringing It All Together

Getting the Right Stuff into Your Body
Detox Your Home and Skip the Nursery
Manage Stress
For Men
Your Beautiful Better Baby

Index

To our children, Anna and Alan, and their children, and so on

Copyright © 2013 by Better Baby, LLC. All rights reserved

Cover Design: Wendy Mount

Cover Photograph: © nicolas hansen/Getty Images

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN 978-1-118-13713-0 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-22519-6 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-23624-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26342-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

This book contains references to research sources. Full references for the book

may be found at www.betterbabybook.com/research.

Acknowledgments

We wrote this book because, after careful reflection, it seemed like the single
best thing we could do to help the world be better. If parents learn what they can
do to give their children better genes, their children will be stronger, smarter, and
healthier—and then they will pass those genes on to their children. What an
awesome way for a book to live on even as the printed version of these pages
crumble to dust. We are grateful that we had the knowledge, education, and
resources to create this program for our children. But we did not do it alone.

Gary Taubes, the author of the New York Times best seller Good Calories,

Bad Calories, was kind enough to read our proposal and then introduce us to his
agent, Kristine Dahl at ICM, who agreed to become our literary agent. Were it
not for Gary's generosity and Kris's guidance and hard work representing us in
finding a publisher, this book wouldn't have happened. Our thanks to you both,
and to Laura Neely of ICM as well.

Our thanks to Andrew Clark, our researcher, who spent countless hours

finding the references that we used to educate ourselves before we knew this was
going to become a book. There were more than 1,300 references, to be more
accurate, and Andrew formatted and posted them on our website so they will be
available for everyone who has the time and desire to cull through them. His
tireless attention to writing and editing was critical. This book wouldn't exist
without Andrew's diligence and attention to every detail.

Ronnie Falcao, LM, MS, CPM, our homebirth midwife, shared her amazing

knowledge about how birth affects baby health and wellness, and she provided
gentle but insistent encouragement to write this book after she saw how
transformative our program was when we used it ourselves. We are grateful that
Ronnie runs gentlebirth.org, a wonderful site for parents looking to change birth
into the emotional and spiritual experience it is. Barbara Findeisen, one of the
world's foremost experts on pre-and perinatal psychology, also helped to shape
our understanding of birth and how important it is for healthy children. Barbara
can be found at starfound.org. Jan Rydfors, MD, our ob-gyn at Stanford, was
amazingly open and supportive of our nontraditional approach, saying,
“Whatever you're doing, keep it up. It's working!”

Our thanks to Dr. Philip Lee Miller, MD, of Los Gatos Longevity Institute

(antiaging.com), who used bioidentical hormones and nutrition to help both of us
balance our hormones for maximum health and fertility. Dr. Miller generously
provided knowledge and support far beyond expectations, and it made a

difference to us personally, and to the book and hopefully the parents who read
it.

For nearly twenty years, world-class health and medical researchers and

practitioners have been presenting their findings to the public at Silicon Valley
Health Institute (svhi.com) meetings in Palo Alto. Dave is grateful to be
president of SVHI and believes that this book would not have been possible
without the knowledge he gained from more than a decade of learning with
experts. In particular, Steve Fowkes, the biochemist adviser to SVHI, author of
several health books, and head of CERI.com, played a pivotal role in the
evolution of this book by sharing an almost supernatural understanding of the
inner workings of human biochemistry.

Our editor at John Wiley & Sons, Thomas Miller, and assistant editor Jorge

Amaral were hugely helpful in bringing the book to fruition and keeping our
writing concise and on target. Beth Rashbaum, an independent editor, helped to
set the tone of the book early in our process of writing.

The members of the Better Baby team—Andrew, Alexis, and Aaron—have all

helped to pull this knowledge together, and we appreciate the passion they put
into their work every day.

Dave wishes to thank Lana for so closely following this program while she

was pregnant. The results of that effort play with him in our yard every day!
Lana wishes to thank Dave for cooking all of those low-toxin, high-healthy-fat
Better Baby meals, and most especially for making so much amazingly good,
fertility-enhancing, homemade ice cream!

But most of all, we'd like to thank our parents, who did their best to pass great

genes on to us. We in turn are doing our best to improve those genes and pass
them down to our own children, and we sincerely hope they do the same with
their children.

PART ONE

The Better Baby Plan

1

You Are a Cocreator: The Better Baby Plan

There's still much we don't understand about how the wonderful, amazingly
complex little beings called babies develop and grow, even though we've been
trying to figure it out from time immemorial. As part of this effort, researchers
were trying to understand the role that genes play, and in the 1990s they set out
to sequence the human genome. Their work led to today's understanding that our
genes don't have the final word on who we are or what our children will be.
Instead, our children's biological prospects are the result of a delicate interplay
of environment and parental genes. This intricate dance determines which genes
will be “turned on,” or expressed, then passed on to the next generation, at which
stage the interplay of heredity and environment again affects which genes will be
turned on.

The study of the complex interaction of genes and environment is called

epigenetics, a new field of study that, as of this writing, is only fifteen years old.
New as it is, we believe it is going to forever change our basic understanding of
human development and prove to be an even more exciting discovery than the
decoding of the human genome.

As prospective parents who inevitably worried about the worst while hoping

for the best, we had mixed feelings when we learned about early epigenetic
discoveries. We were relieved, because the discoveries meant our genes would
not necessarily curse our children with our shortcomings, but at the same time
we were concerned that epigenetics meant we would not necessarily give our
children our talents, either. The more we learned, however, the more we realized
that it would be possible to tip the scales toward our “good” genes and away
from our genetic weaknesses.

Countless factors can cause any of a baby's genes to turn on or off during the

time in the womb. Even a mother's thoughts and feelings during pregnancy can
play a significant role in determining what personality traits, characteristics, and
behaviors her child may inherit. The three most common things that affect gene
expression are the mother's diet and nutrition, her environment, and her
emotions. Having a healthy father also has a big effect on a baby's genes, much
more than many people realize.

Once we understood the implications of the new epigenetic discoveries, we