Kelsey Kinney: I’m not entirely sure I understand the question here. I assume maybe you’re asking food for supplement, like things like liver. Is that sort of what you’re referring to? Write in to me. Yes. OK. That really depends on where someone’s starting from. Granted, I will be up front here that I don’t work with pregnant clients a lot, so this is just what I would do and what I have done in the past when I’ve rarely worked with pregnant clients. More often I work with people who are trying to conceive, so we’re just getting them to a good point where I feel like they’re getting as many nutrients as possible from their diet and supplementation. Liver obviously is a great thing. That, pretty much, is what you could consider a multivitamin, for all intents and purposes, coming from real food. I generally would have a woman aiming for, like, three to six ounces of liver per week. She can do that all in one shot, once a week, or she can spread it out over the week if she’s having things like pâté every day or something like that. If a pregnant woman or someone who’s trying to conceive can handle that, which is a whole other ballgame when they’re pregnant, of course, if they’re really averse to that, but starting from this no-aversion starting point, as you said, that would be definitely my number-one recommendation, to be getting some liver on a weekly basis. From there, I would look at iodine. I would look at omega-3s, so making sure they’re getting some fish on a weekly basis as well. If not, you’d probably want to consider some sort of fish oil supplementation. Iodine, the same thing. If they’re getting seaweed or lots of seafood that has a good iodine content, that’s probably fine, but if you felt like they weren’t quite getting enough, you may want to supplement a little bit there.
Vitamin A is a little tricky here. You definitely want to be getting enough vitamin A, but there are controversial issues with vitamin A in pregnancy as well, so I certainly wouldn’t go—and this is just personally, from a litigation standpoint—I wouldn’t go anywhere beyond 10,000 IU per day, and I probably would stay a little bit under that, personally. But getting adequate vitamin A is good. Liver could certainly cover that base if this woman is eating liver, but if not, you may want to consider some supplementation.
Are there any other nutrients that you were wondering about specifically? That’s sort of where I would start from, and then probiotics and prebiotics on top of that as well. You definitely want to make sure that a pregnant woman or someone trying to conceive has really good gut health.
Folate. Yeah, a good prenatal vitamin is going to have folate in it, so I would probably consider that just as a supplementation. That would probably be the minimum supplementation I would think of—a good quality prenatal plus liver, and then either doing fermented foods and eating a good amount of prebiotics through the diet or taking those things as a supplement as well. Yeah, I would really consider the folate coming from, of course, diet, but just to make sure that there’s enough because it’s so important, I really would recommend a prenatal supplement as well.
Let me know if there are any other ones you’re thinking of. I should have mentioned that, a prenatal. That’s just an assumption for me. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but I personally would have any pregnant client of mine on a prenatal supplement just to cover those bases because we know that things like folate are so, so important to having a healthy baby that I would just want to make sure at a bare minimum that if their diet was terrible, which hopefully it isn’t if they’re working with me, but if they aren’t getting everything they need from diet, they’re at least getting those very, very important things that we know make a big difference.