Book Review - Real Food

Real Food for Mother and Baby
The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby's First Foods
by Nina Planck




It has only been about seven months since I first had an appointment with my now trusted Herbalist, Linda Lucas. It wasn't until this meeting that I started to shift my basic thinking on nutrition from "diet food" to "whole food". I have always been very adamant about eating a diet in a wide variety of whole foods - fruits, vegetables, whole grains, but I also paid entirely too much attention to calories. I thought that I should only eat about 1200 calories a day. Mind you, I was working out 5 to 6 days a week. 1200 calories was entirely too little, and once I started eating only whole foods, and ditching diet foods like skim milk (that is not to say I switched to whole milk, but that I ditched milk entirely), low calorie, low sugar, low carb items like light syrup, low calorie bread, and nonfat yogurt, I actually lost weight. Just by eating more nutrient-rich foods, which I guarantee was A LOT more calories than I was consuming, I ended up losing about 10 pounds. I tell you, this wasn't my goal, it was more a by-product. My goal, was to get pregnant. I did that too - by getting rid of "junk" - what little processed food I still ate (and drank! hello Crystal Light), and all estrogen rich foods, which includes dairy and soy.

This book has nothing to do with weight-loss. It has everything to do with proper eating in a time when we are overloaded with processed foods. Planck defines "real food" as what is old and traditional. And by old, she means OLD. Not even what people ate in 1900, but what people ate in 1500. Her first chapter is a description of what constitutes real food, explaining fruits, veggies, fish, meat, and dairy. By concentrating on eating only real food, one does not need to really think about nutrition, vitamins, minerals or weight. Diet, processed, and convenience food is what is killing us. Literally. We know more about nutrition now than any other time in human history, yet our diets are worse now than any other time in human history.

Planck's book is extremely opinionated (why do I care if she doesn't like the term "sippy cup"?), and I didn't always agree with everything she had to say. For instance, in the chapter where she discusses nutrition in the first trimester, Planck suggests that if you can not eat because you are sick or nauseated, then just don't eat. Some women may throw-up so much that they are unable to keep down proper nutrients, but this doesn't mean that you can just wave off all nutrition and assume that a baby can somehow get the nutrients it needs, anyway. Not only does this not make sense (if you aren't putting nutrients in, where is the growing baby going to get it?) but my midwife and herbalist both said "Eat constantly!" which I found did help, a lot. I was more sick on an empty stomach, so I can't imagine just saying "Oh Well." to food entirely. Planck writes about how incredibly tired she was during her first trimester, and I'd have to say so, since she admits she hardly ate.

One other thing that I thought Planck should address better is that a person can not toe the line and eat real food and processed food. Real food includes butter (organic, grass-fed), whole raw milk, red meat (grass-fed only), and even ice cream. A person can not integrate these foods into a current diet unless they evaluate their entire diet. Suddenly saying "Oh, wow, butter can be good for you!" and starting to slather their white bread and crackers with butter, is not the point. This would result in weight gain, and a wide variety of health issues.

I found myself glad to be vegetarian (ok, I lie - pescetarian) because I personally can not afford "real meat". Real meat is grass-fed lamb, beef, pork, and free-range chicken. Commercial meat products come from animals that are fed an extremely poor diet of corn and soy, and are usually injected with antibiotics and hormones. I'm sure "real" meat is part of a healthy diet, but I for one, can't afford it. So I'll skip it. :)

Finally, Planck's last chapter is all about baby's first foods. She believes in feeding baby real food that you are already eating. Planck promotes exclusive breast feeding until baby can sit up on his own and starts to show interest in solid foods, which is usually around 6 months. Then she promotes giving baby small pieces of food off your own plate to let them experiment with tastes and textures. One statement Planck made that I particularly enjoyed is that if your baby is breastfed, they are already used to a wide variety of tastes and spices (Indian anyone?). It is counter intuitive to then assume that after these broad tastes, baby needs plain, bland, unseasoned food, which Americans, unsurprisingly, are one of the only cultures of people that do feed their babies special "baby food". She believes this is actually what makes picky eaters. She promotes that a baby who is able to experiment with food on his own, using his own hands and fingers allows him to be much more confident with food and making food decisions later in life. This method is also promoted as being much more parent friendly as parents do not have to take the time to make baby food, or spend the money to buy jarred food, and it is much less of a struggle at feeding time. This does make sense, and is certainly not a new theory, as this was how parents used to feed their children before Gerber got ahold of us. I'm pretty sure this is how I was fed, too since my parents grew their own food.

I have always said a general nutrition rule of thumb is to not eat anything that comes in a box or a bag. This is a virtually fool-proof way to eat only whole foods, without having to count, monitor, or think about your diet. I believe this is Planck's message, applied to parents and babies. Her book just goes into much greater detail about organic food, which ones are worth the money, which ones you can eat non-organic, and a lot about meat and dairy which probably is new information for most of today's consumers. It was a very valuable read for me, to expand my knowledge of food, and more importantly what real food is in a grocery store full of artificial foods.