this is our actual pregnancy stack that we just used our baby is huge extremely healthy thank god good morning friends today i will tell you every part of the supplement stack that i designed for my pregnant wife but before i do please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already like the video and comment on the video for the sake of the algorithm now let's get started some of the subscribers have been asking what my wife took during her pregnancy and some have been asking whether she took a prenatal multivitamin or something like that but
the reason actually i brought up the subject today is because about just over a week ago i came across a news article evie toombs a star show jumper won a lawsuit against her mother's general practitioner on the basis that the general practitioner did not inform her mother that the mother should supplement with folic acid a b vitamin and because he didn't inform the mother the child who won the lawsuit was born with neural tube defects particularly a disease called lmm which has caused her to progressively need a wheelchair more and more in her lifetime be
unable to control her bladder and so on so this news article brings to the forefront the importance of nutrition during pregnancy something that in the us we have to consider a little bit less because we have so many fortified foods like fortified greens also in canada but in this video i want to tell you how i helped my wife supplement for her pregnancy and why i think i'm in a particularly good position to discuss this is because my child was born with unusual health so she is she is constantly at the highest developmental level for
her age she's now four months old she was born 9.75 pounds large she was born in the 99 percentile for height for head circumference and for body weight well one of them was like 95 the other two were 99 if i remember correctly but they have remained in the 99 percentile until very recently where one of them fell to 85 i believe it's her weight but her height is still on the 99 percentile and her head circumference which is very important is in the 99 percentile she's as large as a six-month-old average boy essentially now
some of you have not researched the subject may think hey the size of the baby isn't so much associated with the size of the adult for example there's this famous uh british boxer tyson fury who's a giant and he was born very undersized that does happen sometimes and the size of the baby isn't always very much associated with the height later in life however the size of the baby is a very robust indicator of the health of the baby and in my case my baby is extremely healthy and i really believe a lot of it
had to do with supplementation and the reason why also i can say that is because i was not born large at all i was born small and my wife was also born small so usually you go by family trees in terms of expectation of the size of the baby so we really believe that our nutrition and supplementation during the pregnancy had a serious effect on the baby's health studies of how diet affects the outcomes in children really began with people studying how famines in world war ii affected future generations in particular i'd like to draw
your attention to the dutch and russian famines during world war ii the dutch famine which lasted between 1944 to 1945 and covered six months of the winter affected pregnant women in their weights reducing their weight by about 2.5 kg on average and then having an impact on the children reducing their birth weight by about 300 grams on average it also increased mortality of newborns by a factor of six and predisposed those new newborns to diabetes hypertension basically the metabolic syndrome later in life thought to be by the way through epigenetic mechanisms because it also affected
their grandchildren later on on the other hand the russian famine lasted between 1941 to 1943. over a six-month period during that time a quarter of babies died during their during the gestation in addition the babies on average were born over 500 grams less than they were before so starving is obviously bad for babies that's for sure but what about supplementing normal diets high-calorie diets with certain macros or supplements well i'm going to take you through evidence-based supplementation for pregnancies beginning and i'm going to talk about exactly what my wife did i'm just not going to
go through every milligram and dosing thing here because it will be too long okay because i want to be fully comprehensive to begin we supplemented with whey protein and i think the best way to introduce this is this subject called balanced energy protein diets which have been used as interventions for pregnant women around the world to better the health of their babies what this diet does is ensure you get about 20 percent of your calories total caloric consumption from protein and limit it there because if it is more than 20 women sometimes get certain deficiencies
of nutrients which they wouldn't have gotten if they ate less calorically dense foods like vegetables and fruits so for this reason we weren't so focused on eating a lot of meat during the pregnancy my wife did eat red meat every day but she supplemented with whey protein three or four times a day to consume a total of 200 grams just from whey protein this allowed her to eat more calories from diverse kinds of foods thereby giving her more nutrients and more signaling phytochemicals that's really important because we did not supplement with healthful herbs hormetic supplements
like turmeric and green tea extract cause some damage to the body for example they're a little bit liver toxic but in the end cause a net benefit in our bodies because we've adapted to them but this is for adults i did not want to run any risks with my children so so my wife didn't supplement with berberine or ginkgo biloba or any of these kind of things that could be potentially harmful so because of that reason it was very important to rely on salads and fruits and vegetables to get all of her nutrients and requirements
in studies increasing pregnant mother's protein consumption from lower amounts to up to 20 percent increases the baby's height by up to six millimeters in average studies and increases the baby's weight by over 300 grams in some studies of course as you guys know protein is a building block for development but it's also a signaling molecule in particular losing potently signals to the body to increase igf-1 signaling and upregulate mtor that's why i was so fond of supplementing with whey protein for my wife although we are usually on a protein on a low protein diet during
the pregnancy she supplemented with a lot of protein and i believe that was the main the main supplement that affected the health and size of my child i really attributed mainly to the whey protein as we usually do my wife consumed 30 grams of chicken liver pate without any bad ingredients every day which covered a bit more of her iron that she wouldn't get from red meat covered some copper vitamin a active vitamin a and so on so where i'm assuming with the rest of these supplements that you have a whey protein and you're eating
liver now moving on there's a lot of evidence to support choline supplementation and pregnant mothers there seems to be a dose-dependent effect on choline consumption in mothers and cognitive behavior later in life for the children showing that choline consumption improves the intelligence and cognition of the children essentially we supplemented with both phosphatidylcholine and cdp cooling because phosphatidylcholine is in a lipophilic format already and it gets metabolized a little bit differently than cdp choline which is a hydrophilic format we also supplemented with large amounts of ep and dha from the best sources those are fish oil
but i just want to warn you about some things if the mother is a bit predisposed toward anemia or low blood pressure or bleeding issues you might not be able to get to the doses that we use which are much higher doses but supplementing with epa and dha is highly evidenced a recent meta-analysis found that it was associated with birth weight we also supplement with two forms of coenzyme q10 that's ubiquinol and mitral q supplementation with coenzyme q10 is associated with less incidence of gestational hypertension which is called preeclampsia vitamin d supplementation is also highly
evidenced a vitamin d supplementation that's less than 2 000 units per day is associated with less fatalities among offspring although higher doses than 2000 units per day are not although in general vitamin d supplementation is associated with less incidence of babies born small for gestation age next vitamin b9 folic acid folic acid is fortified into some of our greens in the united states and in canada so many of you have sufficient folate levels however this is one of the first nutritional requirements that was discovered to be important in pregnancy from the 1960s they noted that
pregnant mothers were more likely to have anemia and other health problems if they didn't have sufficient folate status folate is necessary for dna synthesis and for the methylation cycle so if your wife or if you have particularly poor polymorphisms for methylation this can be even more important note however that you cannot supplement highly with folic acid without supplementing with b12 because that can be dangerous for pregnant mothers as well and have adverse outcomes next vitamin b12 b12 deficiency is linearly associated with preterm births and b12 status is associated with again that preeclampsia the hypertension or
high blood pressure in pregnant mothers although my wife got enough b12 from her liver we also supplemented with methyl b12 as a supplement next vitamin e broad-spectrum vitamin a's are not backed by research evidence for pregnant mothers however certain vitamin a's are so for example we supplemented with lutein lutein supplementation is associated with better health outcomes among children there are studies that show that pregnant mothers have lower oxidative stress levels when they supplement with lutein and the same for the children in fact there's a current trial investigating supplementation of lutein and zeaxanthin in pregnant mothers
that's recent i think it's still ongoing we also supplement it with lycopene which is evidence back it reduces limitations on intrauterine growth growth within the mother and finally astaxanthin astaxanthin has the lowest evidence to support its supplementation but in rodent studies it lowers the likelihood of rodent mothers developing gestational diabetes through lowering oxidative stress it can't likely be harmful so i included it what about other vitamins well first of all my wife also consumed a full spectrum b vitamin supplement the reason why is because of a deficiency potentially in b2 from her diet or so
on i wanted to make sure she had all the b vitamins as for the vitamin e complex it is its use is not supported in pregnant mothers and it could have some risks because it modulates immune activity for example even supplementing with gamma tocopherols can have some unexpected risks so for this reason we stayed away from vitamin e entire vitamin supplementation entirely zinc supplementation and pregnant mothers is also evidence-backed a meta-analysis found a 14 reduction in preterm births as well as an improvement in birth weight but in underweight mothers by the way we didn't supplement
as heavily with zinc as i supplement with so my wife was consuming about half what i consume the reason why is because supplementing a little bit too highly could have other effects on mineral retention i didn't want to intervene too strongly on the natural biological processes in the mother as for iodine supplementation a systematic review and meta-analysis found that even in populations that are only mildly deficient in iodine iodine supplementation in mothers improved cognitive ability in school-aged children later on so we supplemented with iodine as well because we don't use much iodized salt and my
wife wasn't consuming too much salt when she was pregnant in general we also supplemented with calcium because when you take calcium with protein it alters calcium metabolism a meta-analysis found that calcium supplementation reduced the risk for preterm births reduced mortality for the child and reduce the likelihood of the mother developing hypertension while pregnant we also supplemented with selenium even though you guys know that i don't personally supplement with it because there is some evidence that it may reduce the risk of again the hypertension in pregnant mothers by the way the hypertension in pregnant mothers it's
not that we're particularly worried about hypertension it's also a proxy for general ill health in the mother and can damage seriously the baby's health before we leave the subject of minerals i wanted to comment on magnesium and iron so iron supplementation is highly evidenced but my wife was consuming quite a bit of iron because of her consumption of liver and meat and so on low iron levels are associated with anemia while high iron levels are associated with gestational diabetes so you don't want to have too much iron which is why we didn't supplement with it
on the other hand supplementing with magnesium is not evidence-backed and we did not supplement with magnesium for my wife finally i'll quickly mention the other things that we did one was my wife used my anti-inflammatory protocol that's from the first supplement video i did a few days ago you'll see that i take a few supplements on an empty stomach three times a day my wife did exactly that took the same supplements actually in the same doses except she also took tatka which i also take 500 milligrams of but didn't mention in that video now probiotic
supplementation is also evidence-backed in pregnant mothers so for example sublending with lactobacilli reduces the incidence of atopic eczema in children later on i'm talking about supplementing the mother and supplementing the mother with probiotics in general improves glucose control during pregnancy which is important by the way i'm generally going to leave recommendations for brands in a comment that i'll pin below but the comment will probably come up a couple of hours after this video comes out so just check back if you don't see it and the reason why i'm doing that in particular here is because
you really don't want products that are not reliable because your wife may end up consuming arsenic or cadmium or other heavy metals that are found in these supplements sometimes and moreover you need to know that the supplement actually has what it says it has and whatever it has isn't for example oxidized or damaged and so on for a pregnant mother you really have to pay attention to this so i'll leave some brand recommendations below we're almost done there are two more kinds of supplements we use we used a garlic supplement which by the way if
you want a recommendation on that before the video links come out you can go to my blog i have an article on garlic i also have a video on garlic and you'll see my supplement recommendations and why i recommend them and then we also supplement with digestive enzymes there isn't that much research to back supplementing with digestive enzymes but what i've noticed in normal people that supplement digestive enzymes is that their microbiome health improves so that was the reason why i included it there was low risk and a potential benefit by the way in rodent
studies garlic oil supplementation appears to reduce the risk of hypertension in the offspring garlic supplementation to the mothers so that's the entire pregnancy supplementation protocol that we used the only place i feel that it could have been improved slightly is maybe adding in some amino acids by themselves maybe glutamine or glycine may have had some positive effects i want to mention my wife's diet briefly before we end the diet had absolutely zero grains and the only carbohydrates that were to be found in the diet other than the whey protein supplementation was from whole fruits or
vegetables and what we did was essentially we tried to choose vegetables from the cruciferous family and from the allium family we eat those and by the in general vegetables are better when they're steamed or fresh rather than cooked except for tomatoes and carrots which may be different and then the rest of the vegetables and fruits we picked according to color and we also included berries so among the berries the most important ones are blueberries cranberries american cranberries although raspberries and blackberries are also quite useful strawberry is not so useful comparatively but we supplement with those
and out of the nuts we supplemented with also walnuts and pecans and these are not really supplements these are our normal diet but i made sure that she consumed these every day because they had huge impacts on the health of that of the children and as i said we consume liver and red meat as well so we have salads liver red meat some eggs and then the berry nut mixture which we usually eat every day anyway guys i hope this was helpful for you this is our actual pregnancy stack that we just used our baby
is huge extremely healthy thank god and i really thank god our baby is very healthy developmentally advanced and i hope that yours could be too i really believe that this supplementation protocol and the diet altered the health of my baby as i mentioned earlier i think that whey protein had the biggest impact but i do believe a lot of these supplements had impact and together they were transformative anyway guys i'll see you later on this afternoon thank you so much for bearing with me i hope this was helpful [Music] you
