I remember being pregnant and constantly thinking about if I was making the right decisions for my health and my baby’s. When you’re growing a human you might be thinking about A LOT of things, I know I was. And maybe one of those 854,829,738 things is about your gut health, and maybe it’s not 😜 so I’m here to tell you the things that can be helpful or can happen when it comes to supporting your gut through pregnancy.
Having a healthy gut during pregnancy helps with many, many things - including but not limited to, nutrition absorption, strength of your immune system and protection against infection. These are huge factors that play into your overall health and a healthy baby too. It’s so important to find ways that you can nourish your body and feel good.
One of the best ways to support your gut is obviously through the food that you are consuming. We go over a lot of this in my gut guide (check it out here!), but in general, you want to eat a diet of organic produce, healthy fats, antioxidants, bone broth and probiotic-rich fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi. The more of these types of foods you can consume the better.
You also want to do your best to avoid processed foods with things like artificial sweeteners, msg, pesticides and artificial food dyes. Foods that contain these are more likely to disrupt the natural environment of your gut and cause you to feel awful.
Don’t forget that when you have a healthy gut it helps your baby have a healthy gut too!
To learn more ways to support your gut health, grab my Gut Health Made Easy Guide here!
Let me give you a heads up incase you didn't know.... nearing the end of your pregnancy be prepared for a v swab to test for this strain of bacteria, knowing as GBS (Group B streptococcus). This bacteria can cause health issues for baby if it is present when mom delivers.
There are a lot of different reasons that it is important to care for your gut while you're pregnant. One that was at the forefront of my mind when I was carrying my little guy was maternal Group B streptococcus (GBS) specifically in the v💮ginal canal.
If you test positive for GBS in certain settings you will be prescribed an antibiotic during labor (and sometimes before) and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible, which I knew was possible.
Enter the gut health focus.
I had been taking a probiotic before pregnancy and continued to do so during, especially containing two strains, both of which have over 25 years of clinical data supporting their supplementation during pregnancy. lactobacillus rhamnosus, GR-1 and lactobacillus reuteria, RC-14.
The other idea with this is to help your baby be seeded with healthy bacteria during birth, which can absolutely impact your baby's gut health too.
These two strains were used in a well designed, randomized trial of 99 pregnant women who tested positive for GBS at 35-37 weeks. Half of the women received probiotic treatment (containing 10 billion CFU of each strain), while the other half received a placebo.
The women were tested again for GBS when they were admitted to the hospital for delivery and among the women who received probiotics 43% tested negative for GBS compared to only 18% in the placebo group.
Besides a probiotic you can get these strains in sweet potatoes, or yams, artichokes, and beans, some yogurts, Fermented milk/kefir, Sauerkraut, Miso, Kombucha.
As someone who is passionate about nutrition and has been pregnant before, I find it hard to believe the lack of education when it comes to nourishing your body while pregnant. Especially when it comes to gut health which plays a HUGE role in your body and overall health.
When I was taking microbiology for my nutrition and dietetics degree we talked about the different bacteria present in our gut, but that the science was really new and we didn’t know too much. That statement is still being said today, and in theory, still true. I don’t think we’ll ever know literally everything about the body, but we do know that certain strains of bacteria have been shown to be present or not present during certain health conditions.
When you are pregnant, your body is constantly changing and you have the potential to be given different diagnoses that you might not normally be when you aren’t pregnant. One of those diagnoses is gestational diabetes. It’s actually been observed that pregnant women who have gestational diabetes have different levels of certain bacteria in their gut throughout their pregnancy. One specific bacteria is important and aids in breaking down fiber in your diet to help promote gut balance; which means it's important! Consuming a fiber-rich, balanced diet can help support the levels of this helpful microorganism.
Another study showed that a diet packed with fiber, legumes, vegetable, fruit, and nut intake are associated with an increase in butyrate; a powerhouse for pregnant mamas (We talked about butyrate last week!)
So bottom line, balancing out some of those fruits and veggies, along with other nutrient dense foods can be really helpful when it comes to keeping your microbiome healthy during pregnancy!
Grab my Gut Health Made Easy Guide HERE to learn about supporting your gut and feeling good!
When you are pregnant your body is experiencing some crazy changes; from hormones, physical changes, metabolic changes… the list goes on! One you might not know about or even think about is actually your gut health!
Gut health is so important to be mindful of while you are pregnant and yet it isn’t talked about enough, so that’s why I’m here! Having a healthy gut while you're pregnant is important because it aids in the absorption of nutrients essential for a healthy environment for baby. It also has been shown to impact gestational diabetes and preeclampsia too! (something you're often not told about!)
So let’s talk about how can you support your gut health while pregnant to stay healthy and feeling good (which is always our #1 goal!).
Without getting too “science-y,” butyrate is a fatty acid that is produced through microbial fermentation of dietary fibers in the lower intestinal tract. This fatty acid is important because it feeds the cells lining the colon, promotes a healthy gut barrier, and prevents “leaky gut.” This powerhouse does A LOT of different things in your gut, but especially for pregnant women. It lowers the maternal blood pressure during pregnancy and is the main source of energy for cells building the intestinal epithelium as well as helps support the immune system.
Thankfully, there are foods available to you that contain butyrate naturally! These include hard cheeses (think Parmesan and pecorino), butter, full-fat yogurt, and fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, pickles, and tempeh. Nourishing your body with these different foods allows your gut microbiome to supercharge the production of butyrate.
Join the waitlist HERE to gain access to my pregnancy guide when it launches; packed with recipes, resources and ways to support your body and feel good during pregnancy!
Can I be honest with you?
Having a baby is amazing.
Living life after having a baby is also amazing.
And sometimes it can be hard.
At the very same time as looking at this little bundle of joy in your arms while you're feeling huge surges of oxytocin (ie that love hormone) you can also be feeling sadness.
Maybe the sadness isn't even related to being overtired and awake at crazy hours, often alone. Maybe it's just the state of the world. Maybe it's that we're often forced to go back to work way way way too soon (at least here in America). Maybe it's that you forgot to load the clothing into the dryer or put that food in the freezer so it doesn't go bad.
Motherhood is a whole lot of different feelings and I suspect that doesn't ever change no matter how old our children get or how many we have.
And with all of those feelings we can also support are mental and physical health to oftentimes feel better (better can mean a lot of things of course).
Keeping with our central theme these days, mental health (i.e. how ya might be feeling) is hugely impacted by the gut, in many more ways than just one (or even several) IG posts can really discuss. But to keep it short and simple, what you eat and what you put on your body directly impacts your mental and physical health.
The Gut-Brain Axis (exactly what it sounds like) plays a role in mood regulation. Gut health influences neurotransmitter production, and disruptions in gut function may contribute to mood swings and affect postpartum mental health, which is closely tied to hormonal fluctuations.
Which means it's so important that we take proper care of our gut, but how do we do that!?
Grab my Gut Health Made Easy guide here to learn how!
