Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 3, 2015
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Julie: Hello and welcome to the Paleo Baby Podcast, I'm Julie Kelly, and today I'm joined by Chloe Archard, founder of Paleo Britain and co-host of the Eat Better Podcast with Nourish Balance Thrive good friend Tommy Wood, who visits us on our podcast regularly. I'm really excited to talk to Chloe because I think we have a lot in common as moms and Paleo news spreaders, word spreaders, whatever you want to call us. You've also got a degree from Oxford University, and I'm going to get this wrong I'm sure, but molecular and cellular biochemistry. Is that correct?
Chloe: Yeah, that's correct.
Julie: Fabulous. Yeah, I was really excited to have you on. Welcome, Chloe.
Chloe: Thank you so much. I'm really pleased to be on as well. This is the first podcast I've done that's not our own one. I'm being on the opposite side. Yes, it will be fun.
Julie: It is. It is fun. I'm sure you'll have a lot of good insights. Mostly, we wanted to talk -- My husband, Christopher, who does the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast, suggested that we chat and get you on because I think we have a load in common. But mostly because, I mean, you've got two kids and one on the way. When is your next one due?
Chloe: So number three is due at the end of November. I've got a three-year old little girl called Olive and a two-year old little boy called Lance. They're all pretty close together.
Julie: It's a lot of fun though. It's chaotic but it's a lot of fun. I only have one so I can't even imagine but, yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Chloe: And your little one is two, isn't she?
Julie: Yeah, she'll be two in about three weeks. She's October 12th. She'll be two.
Chloe: Because my little boy was just two end of August so they're close in age.
Julie: Yeah, yeah. Crazy little chimps. Lots of fun. How did you get, find Paleo? I mean, because you founded Paleo Britain with your sister, so there must be some story there on how you, first of all, how your whole family is involved in it. But what brought you to it and how long have you been on this road?
Chloe: Well, I've always been really fascinated by nutrition even from a young age. I've always loved reading about and learning about nutrition. But unfortunately, obviously, from a young age I went down the wrong route of believing all this sort of low fat diet as best and we should be eating lots of whole grains and all of that kind of thing. So for a long time I did probably follow the low fat guidelines. But it was when probably about three or four years ago, I just read Gary Taubes' book The Diet Illusion, which I think might be called Good Calories, Bad Calories in America. It was called The Diet Illusion over here.
And that talked about how actually saturated fat had been so demonized and really wasn't the problem. And that was such a revelation/rebirth for me that really changed my thinking and I got much more into the idea of exploring low carbohydrate diet. And it's just really from there I found different books and eventually I read the Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson and then I just sort of heard about Paleo.
Obviously, over the years I've tried loads of different silly fad diets but Paleo is one of those things that was just like, "Oh my goodness." When you do it, you feel absolutely amazing. It isn't like any kind of fat diet. It's about eating real food, no processed food. I just think I felt so amazing that I was telling my sisters, "You got to try this." And they all tried it. They all felt amazing. We just became real converts, which I think is what happens to so many people that tried Paleo. It's such a shift in your thinking because you're like, "I can't believe for so many years I've--"
You follow guidelines but actually nothing makes you feel as good as when you just eat really good wholesome real food. And that's really what it's all about. And I think just we came really converts after we had sort of found it and, yes, so then we started the website a couple of years ago. It's been about two or three years that I've been eating a pretty much Paleo diet.
Julie: And what's been the response there in Britain? I mean, do you feel like it's kind of coming around? Do you feel like more people are getting into it? Do you think that there's a popularity? Or is it like here, it feels like Paleo is sometimes kind of a little bit of a fad, like it's been turned into a fad even though when you're doing it it doesn't feel that way? What's it like over there?
Chloe: There's definitely a huge interest in the UK. It's really grown over the last couple of years. The trouble is, and I think it's maybe a similar thing in the States, I know it's definitely something that happens in Australia, but these sort of nutrition foundation, all the bodies that give the advice to the general public absolutely hate this idea that the message might go out that we should all cut down on sugar and cut down on grains.
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So there's a big kind of anti, the media, try and really discredit Paleo over here. And so any time an article seems to be published about the Paleo diet, they say it's extremely low carb and it's restrictive and it's this and it's that. And they paint a really bad picture of it. That will always be a bit of a block to people actually looking into it and not just seeing it as a fad diet, which is really sad because that isn't what it's about at all. But I think it's just painted really badly in the media here.
Julie: Yeah, I feel like it's up against the same kind of thing here, almost to the point where it's frustrating. I was nodding my head in agreement when I was reading the front page of your website when you said you didn't even want to call the website Paleo Britain because it has this kind of connotation and people just kind of jump to conclusions. I definitely can identify with that. So you've been Paleo pretty much since you had your kids. Did you notice anything?
I mean, I just accidentally became Paleo six months before I got pregnant and I was really excited that that happened. I just felt really fortunate. I still suffered from lots of morning sickness but besides that I feel like I had this really healthy strong pregnancy and birth and post partum because I had just so happened to have changed my diet before I got pregnant. What was your experience with that with your first pregnancies?
Chloe: I hadn't come across Paleo when I was pregnant with my daughter. She's going to be four in December. And I hadn't heard of Paleo then. But I had for quite a few years eaten a diet that was sort of mainly real food, not really eating processed food. But I still did eat grains and things. And then I really sort of got into Paleo after probably straight after my son was born, is when I was really reading about it. I definitely weaned him completely different how I weaned my daughter based on things I had heard about.
So, with my daughter, although she's always eaten home cooked food, I did still wean her on quite a carbohydrate-based diet and I gave her things like baby rice and lots of starchy vegetables like butternut squash and things as her first foods. Whereas with my son, I weaned him quite differently. But with the morning sickness thing, what's been interesting is that so with both of my previous two pregnancies where I didn't really eat Paleo and didn't really focus specifically on nutrients and things before I got pregnant, I did suffer really badly from morning sickness and it was all day long. It was from the minute I got up to the minute I went to bed.
And it lasted up to 12 weeks. And I couldn't eat. I just couldn't stomach any healthy foods so I just pretty much lived off on fine carbohydrates for the whole time, which was awful. And I knew at that time I wasn't doing the best thing for the baby but I just felt that I couldn't stomach anything else. When we decided we wanted to try for baby number three, I started -- I'd already been eating Paleo, I should say, for probably 18 months. And since I've had my son and I read a lot about eating a really nutrient dense diet to try and stave off the morning sickness. And I read a couple of interesting blog posts, one of them was from Wellness Mama.
Julie: Yeah. I really enjoyed your blog post on this. I was reading it again and I really enjoyed it. Yeah, Wellness Mama is great.
Chloe: And she talked about magnesium oil having really helped her I think in her fifth pregnancy. I hadn't been using magnesium oil but I thought I'd give it a go. And so with pregnancy number three, in the couple of months before trying to conceive, I ate really nutrient dense diet, loads of eggs and egg yolks, bone broth, loads of vegetables, fermented foods, just as much goodness as I could get. And then I was using magnesium oil and I started taking some pregnancy supplemented which had methylated B vitamins in.
Julie: Yeah, that's great.
Chloe: Which again, in my previous pregnancies, I hadn't taken. I just sort of taken the standard whatever you could buy in the local chemist, which I don't think will probably be a very good quality multivitamin. They're just sort of the ones that are heavily marketed for pregnancy. And I also took cod liver oil, which I hadn't taken in my previous pregnancies. And this time around, although I can't say I didn't have any morning sickness, I still did.
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I only had it in the evenings, which was a huge difference to before. I didn't have any tiredness or that horrible lethargic feeling during the day. With both my previous two pregnancies, I'd just been so exhausted and those past 12 weeks literally dragging myself around. And with my son, Lance, because I already had my daughter, it was so hard just feeling absolutely exhausted.
And this time, I felt absolutely fine all day and it was only in the evenings. It used to kick in about 6 o'clock in the evening. And then I would feel tired. But I just usually go to bed at 8:00, 8:30 in bed. And so whether or not it was the change, really focusing on nutrients and things that helped or not, there definitely was a difference this time. And I think because I've had both a boy and a girl before, sometimes people will say, "Oh, but you feel really sick if you're having a girl and you don't feel sick if you're having a boy or whatever."
But I've had one of each and felt the same both times. So I do think that all those things did help. And as I said in my blog post, if you've experienced morning sickness and you know how horrible it is, you would do, you would try anything to make it more bearable. If there's something small you could do like using magnesium oil that does make a difference, it's really worth trying.
Julie: Yeah, I think that's huge, I was going to say. I mean, I think a lot of times, women -- I have clients or people we work with, a lot of them have said, "If I'm going to be trying to get pregnant, what can I do?" I think, obviously, it can seem really complicated and sometimes they want the very specific list of things that they're supposed to eat, things that they're supposed to do in order to optimize for fertility or just have a really health pregnancy.
When I mentioned really simple things like just eating whole food and focusing on really maximizing nutrients, they look at me like I'm kind of crazy, like that can't be possibly be it, there has to be some other magical pill that they must have to take. And really, I don't think that's the case. I think you should probably make a concerted effort to maybe do a little bit more tracking to make sure you're hitting all of your nutrient goals and making sure that your nutrient density is really as high as it possibly can be because I know we get pretty lazy about that.
Because we eat so well all of the time, I think we can get pretty lazy about tracking. So every couple of months, we'll do that. We'll use CRON-O-Meter or another app or something like that to make sure that we're getting a lot of variety and making sure we're hitting all of our nutrient groups. But it really is kind of simple when you think about it. It's just making sure that you're eating whole nutrient dense food. And adding a few supplements, I think, is always kind of wise as well.
That kind of brings me to -- You've been documenting on your blog and in some of the podcasts and whatnot of working with my husband on using the uBiome to track your gut biome. And it's something I'm really interested in and I think a lot of people are interested in is how the gut biome is affected by eating a Paleo diet, eating a low carb diet and what we can do to really influence our gut microbiomes. What are some of the biggest standout things that you've learned from using the uBiome test?
For those people that don't know what it is, it's just a company, a startup company. They basically are identifying all the species within your gut microbiome so that you have the data. They don't do a lot of analysis on it but there are people out there that do that we can recommend. But what have you found as being the most interesting or the standout lessons you've learned as you've gone along and then tracking your data on your gut microbiome?
Chloe: Well, I'm actually taking part in the webinar, which is tomorrow, with Chris and Grace Liu, which I'm really excited about because, obviously, they both know a lot more about the uBiome results than I do. I am absolutely fascinated now by gut health. It started about six months ago. I mean, obviously, with Paleo, there's always been a big focus on gut health. But I feel like a lot of the information that's out there talks about leaky guts and intestinal permeability and how that is a problem.
There's not that much that talks about why that intestinal permeability sort of rises in certain people and not others. So, obviously, a lot of it is blamed on foods like gluten. But then there are plenty of people that do eat gluten without issue.
Julie: Right.
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Chloe: And Tommy who mentioned I do, who I do our podcast with, he's always said to me, "What about all these people that eat gluten without seeing any problems?" And there are the blue zones where people have extreme longevity. So five areas of the world where people live to be over 100 are much high proportion of the population compared to anyone else. And in a lot of those blue zones, they eat gluten, they eat dairy, they eat whole grains. So they're using a lot of the foods that we're sort of told detrimental.
So how come some people can eat those foods and not have an issue and other people eat those foods cause huge, huge issues? So about six months ago, when I started learning about the microbiome and the effect, the huge effect that these bacteria have on our health, I just found it absolutely fascinating because I think obviously we're just right at the very, very beginning of what we understand and there's so much more to learn.
But I do think that over the next few years, we're going to learn so much more about how actually the bacteria that reside in our gut are hugely influential on our health. And it's probably the profile of bacteria that you have that determines whether you are somebody that suffers a lot more from things like intolerances or whether you're quite robust and you can be one of these people that smoke, drink, live until you're 90. So I find it really fascinating.
But, yeah, I started looking into uBiome. But unfortunately, I've only had a uBiome test since I'd been pregnant because I only started learning about it in the last six months and I am nearly seven and a half months pregnant now. So I was already pregnant when I started reading about it all. When I got my first uBiome results back, I was sort of looking into what it all meant, but actually I came across quite a few papers that say that pregnancy in itself really changes the microbiome quite dramatically.
And so, usually what happens when you're pregnant, and I don't think anybody understands why, but you get reduced diversity. And although they don't know, although it's not 100% known what is really good or what is bad in the microbiome, what's accepted I think is that if you have more diverse bacteria that's a good thing. And for some reason in pregnancy, these studies show that the diversity decreases.
So I don't know why that is because obviously you would assume that actually when you're pregnant the diversity would increase because you would think it's trying to be more beneficial for the baby. But actually all these studies show reduced diversity. So when I got my first uBiome results back and I actually ran it through a program called MG-Rast, which there's some stuff in my blog about, that will give you a diversity score. And the diversity score was quite low because I'm pregnant. I don't know whether that reflects anything at all.
And so what I'm going to do is do -- In the papers I've looked at, they've all tested the mothers about month after pregnancy and found that the microbiomes dramatically different than what it was like during pregnancy, and much more similar to what it was like before pregnancy. So I'm going to do a test about a month after I've had the baby and that would be interesting to see what the results show in comparison to what it shows now. But it's really hard to sort of make any conclusions because when I read all these papers saying pregnancy completely alters the microbiome, then you think, "Oh, I really wish I've done a test before I was pregnant."
Julie: Yeah, I know. It's like something we continuously come up against in this business. It's just like, "Oh, I wish I would have tested when--" It's always in hindsight. Like, "I wish I would have done that test." No matter what the test is. It's always just, "Oh, I wish I'd done one more so I'd have a little bit more data."
Chloe: Exactly. But as I said, I'm taking part in the webinar tomorrow with Chris, which I think I can't wait because I think they got ten results from ten different people which they're going to discuss. And I think it will be fascinating just to hear from different people different health states. I've never really had any health issues at all. I was doing the uBiome just for fun really and I just find it fascinating to see what's in there. But obviously, because I am pregnant, I probably can't draw too many conclusions.
Julie: Yeah, it will be really interesting to see what happens. Have you tried -- Are you taking more probiotics or have you changed your diet at all to try to influence your gut biomes since you've taken the test?
Chloe: My plan was to do the uBiome test when I'd been eating just like a standard Paleo diet for the last couple of years. And then to really to try and increase prebiotic fiber.
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And then do another uBiome test and see what result that had. So I'm still going to do that. I'm going to take another test in about a week. So for the last six weeks, I'd been really increasing the amount of prebiotics I've been taking and mainly following the advice from Grace Liu's blog actually where she talks about her bionic fiber. But I've tried to get -- She recommends that people take inulin and, I think, it's Glucomannan.
Julie: Glucomannan, yeah.
Chloe: And one other prebotic fiber. But I wanted to try and get the fiber from whole foods sources if I can because that's what I really believe in. So I'd been eating things like tiger nuts, which are high in resistant starch and yacon syrup, which is really high in fructooligosaccharides. So I'd been putting yacon syrup into smoothies and -- What else have I been adding? I've got some green banana flour, which is just dried and milled green bananas. And I've been adding that sometimes to smoothies or I'd been adding green bananas when I can get them to smoothies.
And I'd been eating quite a lot of cooked and then cooled potatoes. So I've just been trying to increase the fiber intake of my diet by doing as much as possible from whole foods. Obviously, as well because I'm pregnant. I haven't wanted to take any unnecessary supplements. So I've been doing it just from whole foods sources where I can. Yeah, so I've been doing that for the last six weeks and then I'm going to take another uBiome sample even though I am still pregnant just to see how it compares to the sample I took before adding all these fibers to the diet.
And then I'm going to do another one post pregnancy and just sort of have the three to compare. But I think uBiome is fantastic and it's not too expensive so it's something that actually you could do once every couple of months to kind of track what's going on, make changes to your diet, do another test, see how it affects you.
Julie: I think it's huge because I think just the collection of data I think it just, it's a good practice for people to get on because I think it helps you start to take ownership of your health and take ownership of your body and understand that what you eat affects everything and how you live your daily life and the choices you make can affect everything. And even though we have a huge understanding of what exactly that data might mean yet, I mean, I think it will be really fascinating in five, ten years time as we learn more and more to be able to look back at your data and do some experimentation and see how things change.
So, yeah, we always recommend that one. I'll put a link in the show notes to uBiome so that people can look that up. It's a great test. We actually ran one on our daughter Ivy and it was fascinating. We had Grace Liu look at it and she said it was one of the best ones she's ever seen because she just had this really beautiful diversity and lots of the good stuff. She didn't have a ton of Bifidobacter, which is always one that is touted as being one of the best ones but, I think, it's very dependent upon other factors in your life, is how important it is. But yeah, it's been really interesting. So we want to test her again after she's weaned to see how that's changed.
Chloe: And it's really interesting because you're still breastfeeding, aren't you?
Julie: Yes.
Chloe: And, I think, that's huge. I think that's huge. From everything I've read, the method of birth whether you have a vaginal birth or a C-section and then whether or not you breast or formula feed, that has such a huge impact on the developing gut microbiome and actually on how the gut microbiome will be long term. And that then has huge implications for whether your children will be more likely to suffer from allergies and asthma or obesity and depression and all sorts of things. So, I think, that's really huge.
One of the things, I mean, in the UK, we are pro breastfeeding. All the midwives that you see are very pro breastfeeding. But nobody really talks about why. It's just become this thing that the breast is best campaign and everybody is told it's better to breastfeed. But I was never ever told why it was better to breastfeed. It's just you're almost sort of guilt--
Julie: Yeah, it's a huge lack of communication, I find. I feel like it's the same thing here. I think that's led to, obviously, the companies that make formula are really good at marketing. But because there's this absence of knowledge about why it's important to breastfeed, I think that actually hinders the message because I think it leaves room for women to say, "Oh, well, yeah, sure it might be best but it's not very convenient, so I'm going to do -- We use formula."
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Or, "I have XYZ circumstances and, therefore, it's okay that I'm not breastfeeding. I'm going to choose formula instead." And so it's kind of created this dialogue where it's more of a conversation about what's best, what you will decide as best as opposed to what is actually best.
Chloe: Yeah, exactly.
Julie: And that's what really frustrates me because I think I meet a lot of moms and, obviously, there's always circumstances where breastfeeding isn't possible. But I think there's a lot of resources that could help women to breastfeed but I think they maybe sometimes don't take advantage of them or don't try as hard as they could to make it work because they don't really fully understand how important it is and they don't really fully understand why it's as important as it is. Yeah, I think that's a really, really great point.
How has it been with your kids? I mean, I know you said your daughter was weaned differently than your son. How have you seen that play out? Because that's something I get asked about all the time because Ivy eats -- She's never eaten anything different than what we eat. I've never made her baby food. She's never had whole milk. I'm not going to wean her onto a bottle with milk in it. There's all these questions that come up and I'm always curious to talk to other moms who have been through this and what their experience has been.
Chloe: I breastfed my daughter and my son and both of them I weaned them off breastfeeding because I fell pregnant with the next baby and just found it, they're a bit too much to carry on feeding and being pregnant. Because my son and my daughter are quite close, she was about 15 months when I weaned her, my son was 18 months when I weaned him. And the same, I never weaned them onto a bottle because they were old enough to not need a bottle.
They do drink, my kids do drink milk but we live near an amazing biodynamic farm that's community owned and community run and they produce raw dairy from completely grass fed cows and they produce raw kefir, raw butter, raw cream and all the lovely dairy products. Because we've always sort of gone to that farm, bought our dairy from there, my kids do have dairy. But they never will like -- They never had a bottle of milk. They just will sometimes have milk as a drink.
So they don't have a huge amount of it. And I personally don't really have very much dairy because I don't think it agrees with me much. But it seems fine for the kids. They seem fine with it. But with my daughter, yeah, I weaned her and I did follow the whole sort of like give them baby rice first and then give them vegetables like butternut squash and things like that. Whereas with my son, I had read that a lot of the Weston Price Foundation information. His first food was egg yolk. It was completely different and I would have never given my daughter egg yolk because I thought that--
Obviously, everyone needs to do their own research and you can't recommend to people something that's not kind of generally recommended. Obviously, people need to look into it themselves. But the Weston Price Foundation say that you should give runny egg yolk as the baby's first food because it has all the nutrients that their brain really, really needs. A lot of my friends will go, "I would never give my kids runny egg yolks. It needs to be a hardboiled egg yolk." I did all my own research, bought really good quality eggs and I was confident to give runny egg yolk as the first food.
And my son absolutely loved it. Whereas my daughter always spit food back out, he absolutely loved the egg yolk from the first moment he had it. And then his second food was liver, and I just used to make [0:29:16] [Indiscernible] puree from chicken livers. And he would have that with the egg yolk. And then gradually I moved him onto like some fruits and vegetables. And I kept him off grains for quite a long time. My kids do occasionally have grains now but it's things like soaked porridge oats. And I kept my son off grains for a lot longer.
To be honest, both of my kids have been really, really healthy. We've been really lucky they've never had to have doctor's visits, antibiotics or anything like that. So there's not a huge difference between the two of them in the way they are weaned. My thinking on the whole thing just shifted.
Julie: Yeah. No, I think that's huge.
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And I think that's important. I mean, they're very close in age too so it's not like your daughter was raised one way and your son was raised another way specifically. It's not.
Chloe: My son is a lot less fussy than my daughter. So the biggest thing for us is because he had quite unusual flavors like liver and he had sardines and lot more of a range of vegetables, he will pretty much eat anything now. And he loves strongly flavored foods like olives. Whereas my daughter, who was weaned on a host of quite bland baby food, she is so fussy. I mean, she eats well because I do try and give her as much nutrition as I can so she eats a lot of eggs and things like that, but she is incredibly fussy. And I do think that's quite a big difference between the first flavors they have. And obviously, baby rice is so bland that when that first of flavor, I actually think that probably not a good thing longer term.
Julie: Yeah, I completely agree. I just felt like I did a lot of reading and I've tried to figure out, okay, what methodology of weaning do I want to use? And I read a lot of the baby-led weaning work and it resonated with me but at the same time I felt like I needed to go with it and trust my gut. And I just followed her lead. And I figured I'm not going to feed her anything until she expresses interest and she can sit up on her own and I feel like it's a mutually exclusive, mutually beneficial experiment for both of us.
As soon as she started interest, I would chew some meat and let her try it or I would chew whatever food was on my plate and let her have a little bit of that. And she loved that. I experimented a little bit with doing some puree, just to see if she would eat it and she did not like. She's never liked anything puree or mushy. She likes just solid foods. So I'd give her -- Like if we were having lamb on the bone or meat on the bone, I'd love to just leave a little bit on there and just let her hold the bone and she wanted.
Chloe: Chunk away on that.
Julie: Yeah. And she loves it. It's great for teething and I've just found that she's just -- her curiosity in food is really strong and the same thing like because she's been exposed to so many strong flavors and lots of variety, I feel like there's not a lot I could put in front of her that would confuse her or make her feel like, "What is that?" She's seen a lot and has a really kind of diverse palate. We got to the Farmer's Market on Saturdays. There's this lovely little Ethiopian food stall and everything is really clean ingredients and gluten free and whatnot. And she loves the chicken that this woman makes and it's just like really strong broth and it's got loads of vegetables and she asks for it every Saturday. She wants to eat that. It's always just thrilling to watch then.
Chloe: Yeah. And I think it's so nice when they eat whatever you do. Because my son isn't fussy, he will eat whatever we eat. And whatever I have on my plate, if I'm eating a different kind to them, he will just straight over to my plate and wants to eat whatever is on my plate. Whereas my daughter would not try. If I was eating something that's smoked salmon and I said try a little bit, she just wouldn't. She wouldn't try it. And I think that's the big difference when you take more of a baby-led weaning approach.
I do think definitely that they're so much more adventurous with food and they're not frightened of food. So I would never know. With number three, I definitely want to do the puree. So with my son, I'll just give him -- I was saying I'll give him liver puree and I did the egg yolk. But I didn't give him any other purees. Everything else was just food on his little high chair trainer that he could pick up and put in his mouth. Whereas with my daughter, the whole stage is like smooth purees and lumpy purees. I cook everything from scratch myself but I still did the whole following the traditional guidelines of pureeing everything.
Julie: I think if we just kind of take a step back and think about what, I literally just thought, "What would our ancestors have done?" What would have been available? What would have been common sense? What would you have fed your child? Baby food didn't always exist, so what did we do before that? You just kind of take yourself back to that. I think it's a little bit easier to kind of get in touch with what really feels right.
I think one of the reasons that a lot of new moms struggle is because they're being told to do things that are actually very contradictory to what they feel is right in their gut. And so it's this constant struggle of, "Well, I'm trying to do what's best for my baby." But the reason they think it's best for their baby is just because they've been kind of conditioned to feel that way as opposed to--
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Because we don't grow up in a society anymore with grandmothers around, great grandmothers around, extended family, aunts and uncles and we don't have lots of kids and cousins around. So a lot of women have never -- Their first experience with a baby is their own child. And so all they have to go on is what they've been told or what they've read. And I think that's the number one thing that I try to get women to understand.
Instead of reading all the books and trying to follow all of the advice to a T, just take a second and just think about what feels right to you and what makes some really good common sense and try to go from there because, I think, you'll find actually what is best for your baby probably comes from that place more so than what any of the governing bodies typically recommend.
Chloe: Exactly. It's like with labor. Because I was lucky -- So I'm one of six. I've got five brothers and sisters and my mom had us all naturally. And she'd always told me labor is fine, yes it is painful but it's fine. Your body is meant to do it. It's natural. It will happen. It will happen, you don't need to panic. And so with my two, I very much -- I was quite calm about labor. I did natal hypnotherapy which I think is called hypnobirthing in the States.
What's absolutely brilliant worked brilliantly for me and I've had two really good labors. And all I ever had when I was pregnant was just absolute horror stories from people about labor, how awful it is. But I just used to always think that surely our bodies are designed to do this. And that's just naturally. Whatever happens, the baby is going to come out and your body is designed to give birth to the baby. So all these horror stories you hear and all these interventions that people have surely can't be right.
And I found the hypnobirthing brilliant and had two really good labors and I try and tell everybody and all my friends that had baby since I have that just don't listen to the horror stories because if you think about it, we are designed to have babies. We don't need to have the epidurals and C-sections and all this intervention that people have because they never used to exist. People don't use to have these things.
Julie: Yeah, I think that's really big. Curiously, I mean, it's funny because I'm one of four. I'm the oldest four. I grew up and I saw -- I'm significantly older than all of my brothers because I'm from my mom's first marriage and they're all from my mother's third marriage. And so I was at each of their births and I have very vivid memories of my mom being pregnant and each labor and delivery. She consistently said over and over and over again my whole life was just get their early and get an epidural and I just felt like, I don't know, something inside me just I knew that that was not what I wanted.
And I really, the whole time I was pregnant, I just knew that I wanted to have a natural birth. My mom's most favorite thing to say was, "Nobody is going to give you a gold star. You don't get a tee-shirt or a high-five or a ceremony for having a natural birth so you should just do it the easy way." That just didn't sit well with me and I didn't believe in that. I'm glad I didn't because I read a lot of positive birth stories.
I read all Ina May Gaskin, all of her work. And I knew that that's what I needed. I just needed a little bit of reassurance that other women before me had done this and had a really positive experience. That really worked for me and I had a great labor, a fairly great delivery, no interventions, and I'm really, really pleased with how that happened. And so, I think, that's great. I'm really glad that your mom gave you that message. It's something I'm definitely looking forward of passing on to my daughter.
Chloe: Yeah, because I think it is. It's about reading the positive stories or hearing the positive stories, such difference because so much of what you hear is terror, horror stories, things that happened to people. But actually so much of that comes because people are scared when they go into labor.
Julie: Exactly.
Chloe: And then it kind of all perpetuates from there.
Julie: Yeah. It's just kind of always talk about this cascade of events. I mean, we talk about it when we're talking about functional medicine and how to get people well and how there can be this kind of cascade of events that kind of just leads you to be in a place where you need to do a lot of digging and figure out what the root cause is and go from there. And I think the same is true about birth and babies and raising children.
[0:40:00]
Let's try to focus more on prevention and focus more on setting ourselves up for success as opposed to having to do a lot of damage control when we've kind of caused this whole negative cascade of intervention and antibiotics. Not that these things aren't great when we absolutely need them because they are fabulous. Western medicine is great for emergency situations. I think the problem is that almost all situations are treated like emergencies now. Yeah, I think that's a really great message.
What about your -- Are you going to continue after you have -- For your kids growing up, because this is something that Chris always harps about and he's been terrified of since he found out I was pregnant. He's like, "But what is she going to eat? We can't put her in school. What if somebody offers her ice cream or bread?" He's been panicking about this stuff. I think he's got a little bit more of a level headed perspective about it now. For you and your approach with your family, when your kids are out in the world, what's your approach about teaching them about food and making choices out in the real world about their food?
Chloe: So we've just tried to -- Because at home we pretty much only have whole foods, just all organic fruits and veg and grass-fed meat and everything, I just think if I do -- if they're always at home have that really good food, nothing processed, then when they're out and about, if they are exposed to processed foods, it's going to be that small proportion of their diet that hopefully isn't, like the whole 80-20 rule kind of thing. So I'm not too strict with mine when they're out and about because I don't want to alienate them.
Like if they go to a party and there are just all the standard kind of cakes and things, I just think, well, let them go on with it and we'd just be back to normal at home. That's the kind of philosophy I take. At the moment, both of mine are in school. They're only in nursery and they take their own packed lunch to nursery, so I can just put all the usual foods they would eat in their packed lunches. So that's easy at the moment. When they go to school, it will be a little bit more difficult because then you would have the issue of school meals and things and whether or not you opt out of school meals and send them with their own when other children are eating school meals and things like that.
So it's something that we have to think about a bit more once they get to school age. But, yeah, I just kind of thing, at the moment, because they're little, they're at home 90% of the time and eating good food, I haven't been too worried about what they have when they're not at home. But I do think as they get older that becomes harder because there's more and more times when they're not eating at home. Obviously, they're in school five days a week and they might be having school lunches. And then they might be going to a friend's house after school or going to parties. That becomes a lot more significant.
I think you know yourself that the foods that you have a taste for will hopefully always be the food that you enjoy. So from a young age, if they've eaten well and they do have a taste for, they enjoy eating all the foods they eat at home, hopefully that will [0:43:20] [Indiscernible] and they won't develop that taste for that really processed foods. I know that my kids, when we went on holiday this summer, if they had an iced cream, they would never ever finish it. They would have a few mouthful and they would have had enough because it's so overly sweet compared to what they're used to.
Julie: Yeah. I found that with Ivy as well. I was really interested to see because when we were over in the UK this summer actually visiting family. It was a sister's birthday. And we also went to another party. Yeah, I mean, she had a piece of gluten free carrot cake and she had probably two or three bites and then she was off playing and doing something else. She's not interested.
Chloe: So, I think, definitely if they've been brought up not to have a sweet tooth and all those sweet foods are overly sweet to their palate, hopefully, they just wouldn't be that interested in them. But it is hard. It's really hard because it's so hard. You don't want your child to be the one that's sort of alienated at school because they can't join in because they don't eat any of the foods other children eat and things. That's really hard to find that balance.
Julie: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I don't want her to -- I don't want to create a situation where she's like looking down on other people for their food choices even though we kind of do.
Chloe: Exactly. Exactly.
Julie: Yeah, it's just curious. Wonderful. We're going to have to have you back on to talk about your uBiome results after the baby comes and you get those. And also after you do your meeting with Grace because I think that will be really interesting. Maybe we can do a whole another.
Chloe: Yeah, I can't wait to see what she has to say but definitely once I've done some tests, some more tests after the baby's been born when can be sure. It's just really hard because at the moment it's hard to draw conclusions because you don't know if pregnancy -- You just don't know what's pregnancy related and what's not.
[0:45:13]
Julie: Yeah.
Chloe: And obviously, the body changes so much during pregnancy.
Julie: Oh, totally. And post partum too. I mean, I feel like I did some testing. I did a whole lot of tests save the stool test right after I had Ivy. It really was frustrating because I couldn't do a lot with the information. I did adrenal stress profile and I did an organic acids test. I've done the uBiome now. I'd just never really been able to do much about any of the results because I've been nursing.
Chloe: Exactly. That's the thing.
Julie: I'm looking forward to that. But I think it's good, just gathering much information and then deal with it as you go.
Chloe: Exactly. And I'm glad I did this test when I was pregnant because it's still really interesting to have it. Then when I have a test when I'm not pregnant to compare, I'll still be able to be, "Oh, look how different it was when I was pregnant or not." I think if you can afford to do the test, I think it's a great thing to do. I know uBiome do quite a lot of offers. Well, I do like a kind of three test kits very much cheaper than normal, if you want to do like a test. It's definitely worth signing up to their newsletter and keeping an eye on the offers they have.
Julie: That is great. Well, definitely, I'll put a link to uBiome on the show notes. I'll also put a link to Paleo Britain in the show notes and everyone should go over and check out Chloe's wonderful blog. She's got lots of great information there. Also the Eat Better Podcast, which is linked from their website as well. It was really wonderful talking to you, Chloe. I can't wait to have you back on.
Chloe: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.
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