Chapter 6
Adopting a Traditional Foods Diet
EVERY TIME EITHER OF US SITS DOWN WITH A NEW PATIENT IN OUR OFFICES, we spend nearly an hour getting to know one another. We take the usual health and family history and listen to the story of their fertility journey up to this moment.
Then we talk about food.
REAL food is essential to optimal health, but unfortunately, most of our modern dietary habits focus on marketing and convenience rather than true nourishment. Modern foods are overprocessed in a factory, packaged in colorful cardboard boxes or plastic bottles, shipped across the world, and designed to have an unnaturally long shelf life.
Real food is the food we humans crave and have been thriving on for millennia—home-cooked stews, savory meats, eggs with bright orange yolks, cream, butter, seasonal fruits ripe with juicy sweetness, and veggies so fresh you can taste the earth in which they grew. These foods will spoil if you don’t eat them—and this is a good thing. Unlike modern foods, real food is teeming with life.
You will read lots of different terms in this book that all refer to real food—nutrient-dense, traditional, organic, local, grass-fed, pasture-raised, biodynamic, and more. Don’t be discouraged if you aren’t familiar with all of the lingo, don’t like to cook, think it’s too expensive, or feel like it’s all too overwhelming … we are here to guide you along the way.
Eating this way is not a new diet fad, it’s a lifestyle—one that promotes wellness, leaves you content and deeply nourished, feeds the local economy, and supports the health of our planet. This kind of “holistic” healing can bring harmony to your life in a way that no supplements or medication can, cultivating the best possible environment for a baby to grow.
Won’t My Doctor Tell Me What Foods to Eat? 
Your gynecologist and/or fertility specialists are highly trained doctors, attending years and years of schooling and residencies. As you might imagine with all that training, they have little time or focus to become experts in holistic health or the wisdom of traditional diets. Some make efforts to educate themselves once they are in practice, and seeking out these types of physicians can be extremely helpful.
By the same token, while practitioners of Chinese medicine receive a well-rounded, “holistic” education, surprisingly, nutritional training is not as thorough as you might expect.
Whether you have put your care in the hands of your gynecologist, a reproductive endocrinologist, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, or all of the above, it is very possible that no one on your team has more than a basic grasp of the best nutrition for optimizing your fertility, and, unfortunately, modern nutritionists don’t either. Luckily, you have us.
While it is commonly recommended that you start prenatal vitamins at least three months prior to conception, popping a few pills each day is simply not enough. The food you eat in the months leading up to conception is equally, if not more, important to your health and the health of your future offspring than a fistful of supplements whose benefits are questionable, at best.
The right foods can help bring balance and health to your body by eating for true nourishment and optimal fertility. We will not be giving you mainstream advice to eat more veggies and whole grains—though we will be teaching you how to eat real, nutrient-dense food that you’ll actually enjoy eating.
While you may not have a crystal ball to tell you if, when, or how you will become a parent, you absolutely can choose to nourish your body in ways that will help your overall health, improving your odds to boot.
What a Dentist’s Discoveries Have to Do with Your Fertility
Whether for buckteeth, overbites, underbites, or just a bunch of crooked teeth, most adults we know have had braces at some point in their lives. Teeth come in a bit wonky, and parents shell out the thousands to straighten them. Besides the cost and a few years of teenage embarrassment, no biggie, right?
While you may take crooked teeth for granted, it’s worth considering why they got that way in the first place. Are humans really designed to have mouths that don’t fit our teeth?
One man, Weston A. Price, a dentist from Cleveland who practiced in the 1930s, had a hypothesis. Crooked teeth, he theorized, were actually a skeletal deformity resulting from poor diet. The more generations exposed to a poor diet, the more dental, skeletal, and overall health problems an individual would have—including a decrease in the ability to conceive future generations.
Dr. Price traveled to remote areas of the globe and found various groups of people with wide dental arches, uncrowded straight teeth, and minimal tooth decay. These people, whether in the Swiss Alps or the aboriginal outback, all had two main things in common beyond their good health:
1. They were not exposed to modern foods, which at the time included vegetable oils, white sugar, white flour, and canned goods.
2. They consumed a diet rich in traditionally prepared foods, which included animal fats. (This was true even of the healthy vegetarian peoples who typically consumed eggs and/or dairy).
In his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price documented his research and provided copious photographs of these healthy, traditional people versus their relatives and countrymen who had been exposed to modern diets and thereby displaced from traditional foods. The imagery is striking, and it clearly shows a decline in vitality as the diet becomes modernized.
In his travels, Price found that among the healthy cultures he encountered, couples who were planning to start a family often began preparing six months to one year prior to conception with “sacred” foods to boost fertility. They would go out of their way to consume organ meats, eggs, fat, and seafood.
Price noted that the mothers in these particular native cultures tended to conceive with ease and experience healthy pregnancies. Their babies and children enjoyed robust health and possessed good bone structure. However, these benefits almost immediately declined when the mother’s diet changed to processed modern foods.
Fast-forward to today: Young couples are not encouraged to consume foods to enhance their fertility, and even “healthy” modern diets are devoid of traditional sacred foods. At best, doctors recommend that women take a prenatal vitamin for three months before trying to conceive, which is advice ignored by many.
THE WESTON A. PRICE FOUNDATION FERTILITY RECOMMENDATIONS
The Weston A. Price Foundation promotes a diet high in good-quality saturated fats from pasture-raised animal sources, wild caught seafood, and other nutrient-dense, properly prepared foods. Here are the recommendations for women who are trying to conceive or are pregnant or nursing:
FULL-FAT DAIRY—4 cups total of whole raw milk (235 ml per cup), cheese (235 g per cup), or yogurt (230 g per cup) plus at least 4 tablespoons (55 g) butter per day
EGGS—At least 2 per day plus extra yolks
SEAFOOD—2 to 4 servings per week plus fermented cod liver oil
LIVER—3 to 4 ounces (85 to 115 g) 1 or 2 times per week plus fermented cod liver oil
BONE BROTH—At least 1 cup (235 ml) per day
BEEF OR LAMB—Daily
COCONUT OIL—At least 2 tablespoons (28 g) daily
FERMENTED FOODS, DRINKS, AND CONDIMENTS—Some each day, preferably each meal
FRESH FRUITS AND VEGGIES—Some each day
GRAINS—Only if properly prepared via soaking, souring, or sprouting
In a perfect world, most women would just jump right on board with this diet, but as you may have noticed, these recommendations are a far stretch from even a healthy standard American diet.
For many people, the suggestion of eating liver and copious amounts of butter is enough to make their heads spin. Luckily, Chinese medicine can help us make sense of why a traditional diet is ideal for fertility, and how to make sure your food choices are right for YOU.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PREP TIME