Pod Insights The Dr. Hyman Show Your Baby's Metabolism is Being Decided Right Now | Jessie Inchauspé About this episode Pregnancy is often filled with anticipation, excitement, and a lot of questions. But biologically, it’s also a powerful window when a baby’s metabolism and long-term health begin to take shape.
On this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, I talk with biochemist and bestselling author Jessie Inchauspé about how nutrition during pregnancy can influence a baby’s development and long-term health. Her new book, 9 Months That Count Forever, takes a closer look at the science behind these connections.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
We discuss:
• Why pregnancy may be one of the most important windows for shaping lifelong health
• Why balancing blood sugar during pregnancy matters—and simple ways to reduce glucose spikes
• The nutrients that matter most during pregnancy, from choline and protein to omega-3s
• How to make healthier choices during pregnancy without added stress or confusion
This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about understanding what matters most and making small, consistent choices that support both you and your baby.
View Show Notes From This Episode
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(0:00) Impact of diet on baby's genetic plan and catching up with Jessie Inchauspé
(2:08) Influence of pregnancy on new book and personal story of miscarriage
(5:32) The importance of diet and placenta's role in pregnancy
(9:02) Explanation and importance of epigenetics in pregnancy
(12:12) Blood sugar management and pregnancy nutrition pillars
(20:12) The impact of glucose on pregnancy and neurodevelopment
(26:32) Managing blood sugar and gestational diabetes risks
(33:50) Interpreting symptoms and the importance of protein during pregnancy
(37:50) Practical dietary advice for pregnant women
(41:50) The role of omega-3 fatty acids and supplementation advice
(50:17) Dr. Hyman's experiences in patient care and epigenetic implications
(53:52) Jessie Inchauspé's book and social media details
(54:27) Closing remarks and podcast information
Transcript 11,697 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dr. Mark Hyman? Your womb is not just an oven.
0:01 Speaker 01 It's more like your baby is a seed and you're the soil. And if you plant this seed in your driveway full of gravel, it's not going to grow as strong and healthy as if you plant it in a nice piece of soil. You're co-creating your baby's genetic plan with your diet. The placenta is not a filter. The placenta does not keep out all the bad and give only the good to your baby. Ninety percent of pregnant moms are below the minimum recommended amount of choline during pregnancy, even though this nutrient builds their baby's brains. We're lying to moms. What happens during pregnancy is very important for the health of their baby. At conception, your baby's DNA is set. But the epigenetics, which genes are switched on, which genes are silenced, that has to do with your diet during pregnancy. The food you eat sends a sort of like postcard to your baby,
0:45 Speaker 01 telling him what world he's going to be born into.
0:48 Dr. Mark Hyman? Jessie Insossepi is a French biochemist. She's a founder and international bestselling author behind the global glucose guidance movement, helping millions stabilize blood sugar for better energy, mood, and metabolic health.
0:59 Speaker 01 If a mom has low protein intake during pregnancy, her baby is epigenetically programmed to have lower muscle mass. Muscle is the organ of longevity.
1:09 Dr. Mark Hyman? You're literally writing the genetic expression software.
1:18 Dr. Mark Hyman? Jessie, it's so good to see you again and have you on the podcast. I can't believe the journey you've been on for the last, I guess, four years since we first talked.
1:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:28 Dr. Mark Hyman? I think I was in Maui, it was COVID. You just come out with your new book and my friend's like, hey, would you talk to my friend Jessie? I'm like, sure, it's a good topic. The glucose goddess, sounds good. I'm all about blood sugar. And you've blown up. It's amazing. It's amazing. Congratulations, because I've been beating that blood sugar horn for quite a while and.
1:47 Speaker 01 Well, you're the OG of blood sugar. Let's be real. I wouldn't exist if it weren't for you.
1:51 Dr. Mark Hyman? I don't know about that. But I think, you know, people are finally coming to terms with this. And now the new dietary guidelines have basically said, hey, eat more protein, eat less sugar, don't eat ultra-processed food, highly-processed food. I mean, it's pretty amazing the turnaround we've seen in just.
2:07 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
2:08 Dr. Mark Hyman? So you've got a new book and a new baby.
2:11 Speaker 01 Absolutely, yes.
2:12 Dr. Mark Hyman? And I imagine that your new baby inspired your new book, which is called.
2:17 Speaker 01 He's my prototype.
2:19 Dr. Mark Hyman? Nine Months That Count Forever. It drives me absolutely crazy when obstetricians.
2:27 Dr. Mark Hyman? Say to their patients, eat whatever you want. It's important to gain weight when you're pregnant. I'm like, have a pint of ice cream, eat cookies. I'm like, are you out of your mind? So we're going to get into all, all the nutrition and pregnancy details and why it matters so much. And some of the research, particularly around epigenetics and help people understand that. Before we dive in, I want you to share a bit about your story. You know, your book is nine months to count forever and it's very personal for you. You had a baby. So take me back to when you were 31 and when you had your first pregnancy and kind of walk me through the journey to how you got to this moment where you want to tell the world that pregnant women should pay attention to what they eat.
3:02 Speaker 01 Well, I was very naive. I thought, you know, hey, I'm the glucose goddess. I'm going to have a perfect pregnancy. I'm going to have no nausea. Everything's going to go perfectly great. You know, cuckoo. And I was proven very wrong. So my first pregnancy, first of all, I was very nauseous. My first trimester, it's brutal. And then unfortunately, I had what's called a silent miscarriage at three months. Meaning the embryo had stopped developing, but I had no idea. I didn't experience a miscarriage. I learned at the three month ultrasound that the embryo had stopped developing three weeks earlier. That I was carrying a dead embryo in my uterus for this long. So it was, it was awful. I would say probably the hardest emotional challenge of my life.
3:45 Speaker 01 I remember telling my husband that if feelings could kill, I feel like I would be dead. And that was the amount of angst and depression that I felt for months afterwards.
3:56 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
3:57 Speaker 01 It was very tough. And I realized, you know, many women experiences, experience miscarriages, but it's not talked about at all. I learned after I went through the journey, I learned that my mom had had miscarriages and she had never told me. That my stepmom had, that my grandmother had, all of a sudden people started talking. So I wanted to share my story about this because it can happen to everybody. Even if you're doing all the quote unquote right stuff, these things happen. Chromosomal abnormalities, things we don't yet understand. And I share my story in the book because it's very important for me that anybody going through this feels less alone. I felt so alone. You know what I did?
4:29 Dr. Mark Hyman? And you blame yourself.
4:30 Speaker 01 You blame yourself. And I was like, maybe it's because I had too much coffee because there are studies showing high levels of caffeine can impact early pregnancy. Pregnancy and I was Googling like celebrities who have had miscarriages. I just wanted to hear stories. I wanted to know that it happens to a lot of people and it's it's not our fault. So after that, I got pregnant again.
4:49 Dr. Mark Hyman? And by the way, as a doctor, I've delivered five hundred babies. Miscarriages are the body's natural way of taking care of something that's not right. Like you said.
4:57 Speaker 01 I know, but it's still super hard.
4:59 Dr. Mark Hyman? But yeah, but usually you don't know that. You don't know that. It's kind of nature's way of taking care of things that aren't.
5:04 Speaker 01 It is, yet, you know, as a mom to be, you're projecting, you're like, oh, my baby's gonna be born in December and you create this whole story in your head. So when you have the miscarriage, you have to disconnect and detach and grieve that story that you had. So I get the I get the scientific reason, but the emotional journey was just very, very hard. And I just want to hold space for people who go through that to say, even though it's nature during its job, it's still really, really freaking hard.
5:31 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, it's hard. It's emotionally really hard.
5:32 Speaker 01 In any case, I got pregnant again. I was very lucky and my boy was born in May twenty twenty five. So he's about seven, eight months now. And as I was pregnant, you know, because my job is scientific research, I was like, hmm, let me see what I can do during pregnancy. Because my doctor was just saying, take full eight and don't stress. And a bit like you said, you know, eat enough so that your baby has enough calories essentially. But the research showed otherwise. I found incredible studies, incredible data showing that what I ate during pregnancy was influencing my baby. Like DNA is one thing, but your diet during pregnancy impacts
6:13 Speaker 01 the baby that you give birth to. You're co-creating your baby's genetic plan with your diet.
6:18 Dr. Mark Hyman? You say your baby's, your womb is not just an oven. It's like.
6:21 Speaker 01 Exactly. You're not, it's not just a bun in the oven. It's more like your baby is a seed and you're the soil. And if you plant this seed in your driveway full of gravel, it's not going to grow as strong and healthy as if you plant it in a nice piece of soil, fertilized and dense and rich. So you're co-creating your baby's genetic plan. You're not just an oven. Your baby will not just take what he needs from you. That's another big myth of pregnancy. If you don't eat enough of the right stuff, your baby's not gonna get enough of it. You're co-creating your baby's plan.
6:52 Dr. Mark Hyman? Although although it does, it does deplete you, like if you.
6:54 Speaker 01 It depletes you. And for example, if you don't eat enough, let's say choline, which comes from eggs or animal foods, your baby will pull from your reserves up to a point. Your baby will never get all the choline that he needs if you're not eating enough of it. And the placenta, as you know, is this temporary organ that we grow in our uterus that brings our bloodstream and our baby's bloodstream in very close connection. The placenta is not a filter, Mark. The placenta does not keep out all the bad and give only the good to your baby. The placenta kind of trusts that whatever's in your bloodstream belongs in your baby's bloodstream.
7:28 Dr. Mark Hyman? Like mercury.
7:29 Speaker 01 Like mercury, but also like glucose, like glucose. So the higher a mom's glucose levels during pregnancy, the higher the baby's glucose level in the womb.
7:37 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
7:38 Speaker 01 And a baby has to deal with high glucose levels in the womb as well in case they're too high. So your baby will feel inflammation, your baby will put on fat to protect himself. And so blood sugar was the first place I dove in and it was just so incredibly interesting.
7:52 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things, you know, the doctors check for is gestational diabetes. At 28 weeks, you get a blood sugar test where they give you this two cokes equivalent of sugar, basically, and you drink it and you measure blood sugar, you know, an hour and two hours after. And it's amazing how, how many women have blood sugar dysregulation. And it's a sign that they're already kind of on their way to insulin resistance. And the problem in America is that 93% of us have some degree of that. Right? 75% overweight, but 93%, even if you're thin, you could have sugar issues. And, you know, we have now, you know, one in two people in America with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. But I think it's actually more than that because I think the criteria are too strict, actually.
8:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and the gestational diabetes is not just about the mom. So if you have gestational diabetes, the studies show that your baby's DNA will be epigenetically programmed to be more likely to get diabetes himself during his lifetime. So at conception, when the egg meets the sperm, your baby's DNA is set. But the epigenetics, meaning the sort of programming of your baby's DNA, which genes are switched on, which genes are silenced, that has to do with your diet during pregnancy.
9:02 Dr. Mark Hyman? I just want to stop you there because you know what you're talking about is epigenetics and most people may not know what that means. I'm going to just take two seconds to summarize it. You've got 20,000 genes, more or less. How do how do genes work? They they have to be expressed. So the gene has to be turned on or off. And there's a mechanism for that, which is epi, the epigenome, which is a regulator which genes get turned on or off, depending on what you do. And they have massive influence on our health. And what has come out in the research, which is quite stunning. It's not just about diabetes, everything. So cancer, heart disease, diabetes, everything that is is happening inside the womb that the baby is exposed to,
9:43 Dr. Mark Hyman? we call it the exposome, is influencing the epigenetic programming that's laid on top of your genome that determines the health outcomes of the baby when they're 20, 30, 40, 50. It's real. So it's really important.
9:56 Speaker 01 And that's the thing we don't tell moms. We say just eat for two, you know, eat enough, and you're going to gain weight anyway. So you might as well eat more pancakes. We're lying to moms. What happens during pregnancy is very important for the health of their baby. And the epigenetic data is interesting. So we see in gestational diabetes that genes that encode for type 2 diabetes risk are higher in the babies of in the babies of moms who had gestational diabetes. And in animal studies, Mark, which is really interesting, they see that when a mom eats a high sugar diet during pregnancy in rats, even if she doesn't have diabetes, her baby has fat storage genes epigenetically activated. So a high sugar diet during pregnancy could also
10:36 Speaker 01 in humans be leading to this epigenetic switch, which means that your baby, from the moment he's born, is more vulnerable to fat gain, to weight gain. And it makes sense biologically because if you have a lot of sugar in the womb, your baby needs to convert that sugar into fat to protect himself from high sugar levels. And that's one of the consequences of, you know, a high glucose diet is that you transform some of that glucose. That's one of the reasons that high glucose levels lead to more fat gain because you're transforming that glucose into fat to protect yourself. And so in these rat studies, we see that the children, the moment they're born, They have this fat storage gene activated and they end up having more fat mass on their body than their peers, even if they eat the exact same diet from birth onwards.
11:21 Dr. Mark Hyman? These are the epigenetic changes.
11:23 Speaker 01 Exactly. And we need to tell moms about this. We need to explain that epigenetics is something that you control. Now, I don't think we should guilt trip moms and say, never eat any sugar. It's really hard. I had cravings. I was nauseous. I could only eat like croissants and pain au chocolat the first two months. So I know firsthand how hard it is.
11:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? The wheat's different. The croissants are smaller.
11:40 Speaker 01 Yes, for sure. But there's actually data, Mark.
11:43 Dr. Mark Hyman? Now you're making me crazy. I want to go to Paris and have a croissant.
11:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, come hang out. But there's data actually in animals also showing that during pregnancy, you get more dopamine from the same amount of sugar that you eat. So you may be getting more pleasure from that croissant when you're pregnant. So you have cravings, you have nausea, you don't feel so good. And so eating sugar becomes something that is more common. And in fact, today, most moms eat more sugar during pregnancy than when they're not pregnant. This is from a survey in the US. So what do we do about all this? Well, we learn about the glucose hacks, which I've been talking about for years, but these can also help in pregnancy. So no sugar first thing in the morning. You have a protein-rich breakfast because sugar first thing in the morning is just going to exacerbate those cravings and you really don't want to go there. And I think we should look at the WHO guidelines
12:30 Speaker 01 of 25 grams of added sugar per day being the maximum. Today, most moms eat 80 grams of added sugar per day during pregnancy. So if we could just get below that 25 grams, it would be super, super helpful.
12:42 Dr. Mark Hyman? Not actually twice what they wanted to do, but Donald Rumsfeld, when he was working for President Bush, went to the WHO when they were trying to lower the sugar because he was in the food industry before. He said, we're going to pull $400 million of funding from the WHO if you do this.
12:59 Speaker 01 Are you serious?
13:00 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, I'm serious.
13:01 Speaker 01 I did not know that.
13:01 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, I wrote about my book, Food Traps. It's so corrupt. So basically, the WHO wanted 5% of diet added sugar and then Rumsfeld wanted 10% and the food industry won.
13:13 Dr. Mark Hyman? So basically, you're really talking about this in a way that I've really never seen before. I mean, there's books on pregnancy nutrition, but like to really go into the depth of understanding what should be a way to create a healthy baby through food. I mean, there's many other things you can do when you're pregnant, exercise and sleep and rest and you know, so forth. But how do you help people think about the big topics, the building blocks of building a healthy diet when you're pregnant? Because if people, you started with, you know, don't eat sugar for breakfast, which is basically what everybody has, muffins, bagels, croissants, you know, sugary yogurts, pancakes, french toast, waffles.
13:51 Speaker 01 Fruit smoothies.
13:52 Dr. Mark Hyman? Smoothies. I mean, what makes me crazy, especially is this new protein.
13:57 Speaker 01 Trend.
13:58 Dr. Mark Hyman? Trend. Dunkin' Donuts.
14:00 Speaker 01 Protein muffins.
14:01 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, Dunkin' Donuts now has protein smoothies, but they're just full of sugar.
14:05 Speaker 01 Yep.
14:05 Dr. Mark Hyman? So you gotta eat real foods.
14:15 Dr. Mark Hyman? So tell us more about how you think about this.
14:17 Speaker 01 So the first one is, has to do with blood sugar and glucose management. It's very important. And the second, so I have four basically pregnancy pillars I talk about in the book. The second one is choline.
14:27 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
14:27 Speaker 01 Choline is a nutrient that builds your baby's brain cells and builds the neurotransmitters, meaning the way that your, that his brain cells communicate with each other. Okay, choline is super important. It's in foods like eggs.
14:41 Dr. Mark Hyman? Highest sources of eggs.
14:42 Speaker 01 Highest sources of eggs. Well, actually highest source is animal liver. So it depends if you eat it during pregnancy or not. Egg yolk, exactly.
14:48 Dr. Mark Hyman? Liver, if you can eat it, is one of the most nutritionally dense foods. I love it. I mean, I grew up on it, like I'm Jewish, so chicken liver, you know,
14:58 Dr. Mark Hyman? chopped liver was a big thing.
14:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:59 Dr. Mark Hyman? But it's, it's really incredibly nutritionally dense.
15:02 Speaker 01 It's very important.
15:03 Dr. Mark Hyman? If you Google it, you know, compared to any of the most nutritious vegetables on the planet, it's orders of magnitude more nutritionally dense.
15:08 Speaker 01 And today, we don't eat organ meat anymore. We just, you know, muscle meat, which has very important nutrition in it. But so egg yolks are very high source of choline. Any animal food, actually, so we're talking, you know, a chicken, salmon, beef, those are really good sources of choline. There's a little bit of choline in plant foods, but really not that much. To get as much choline as in one egg yolk, you would have to eat two kilos of soybeans. So four pounds of soybeans. So if you're vegan, you have to supplement in choline. And actually today, Mark, 90% of pregnant moms are below the minimum recommended amount of choline during pregnancy.
15:42 Dr. Mark Hyman? Wow.
15:42 Speaker 01 Even though this nutrient builds their baby's brains. And in animal studies, when you deplete a mom's choline levels, you give her no choline during pregnancy. The development of her baby's brain is deeply affected.
15:54 Dr. Mark Hyman? That's such an important thing.
15:56 Speaker 01 Fewer neurons, brain development stopping earlier than it should in animals. In humans, we can't do that. We can't say, let's take a group of moms and another group and deplete one group and see the outcomes in the babies. What we can do is supplement moms and see what happens. Because most moms need to eat more choline. And in fact, the American Association of Pediatrics says that failure to provide choline during this critical time can lead to irreparable brain damage, even if there's more choline during the child's life afterwards.
16:26 Dr. Mark Hyman? That's crazy. I mean.
16:27 Speaker 01 And we don't talk about it, even though these big guidelines exist.
16:30 Dr. Mark Hyman? The top source is egg yolks, which often were seen to be a bad food because it has cholesterol in it. But actually, the dietary guidelines in 2015 said cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern in like the fine print. I didn't want to advertise that they've been wrong for so many decades. But when you're talking about neurodevelopmental issues, people don't realize that one in six babies is born with a neurodevelopmental issue. And it ends up as learning disabilities, ADD, autism, the whole spectrum. And that's a lot, one in six kids. And so when you say that 90% of women are deficient in this, it seems easy to fix. So.
17:10 Speaker 01 Four eggs a day and you fix it.
17:12 Dr. Mark Hyman? Four eggs a day.
17:13 Speaker 01 And so there's two really interesting clinical trials I want to mention where they've supplemented moms with enough choline. So the first one is from Cornell University and they took two groups. One group of moms got 430 milligrams per day, which is basically the bare minimum recommendation. And the other group of moms got 900 milligrams a day, which is even more than the. Recommendation. And then the scientists wanted to see if they could measure differences in the kids.
17:37 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
17:38 Speaker 01 And they saw that in that first year of age, the kids who had had more choline in the womb were reacting faster to this very important test, which is just an image reaction test, like how quickly does the baby react to images, but it's connected to IQ as an adult. That's why this test is used. And they saw that in the choline babies, there was 10% faster reaction time during those, that first year of age. So the amount of choline available in the womb seems to be shaping the development of the brain in a way that we can measure. And there's many things we can't measure. We can't measure how it feels to be in someone's brain. It's possible that if you have enough choline, you'll just feel better in your brain. And when I learned about this studies, I called my mom, because I've had a lot of mental health issues in my life. So I was like, Mom,
18:20 Speaker 01 how many eggs did you eat when you were pregnant with me? And she was like, oh, honey, I ate barely any eggs. She ate special K, sugar and orange juice. So for sure, I didn't have enough choline. So for sure, my mom is to blame for everything. No, I'm kidding, but it matters. There's another study also showing placebo group that's receiving zero choline and another group that's receiving nine hundred and thirty milligrams of choline during pregnancy. And the scientists then looked at the kids at three years old. And they sent the parents a questionnaire asking their, asking about their kids. So is he patient? Is he cruel to animals? How well tempered is he? Is he? This is a questionnaire that it's linked to adult mental health issues. And the choline group did better on the results of this questionnaire. So we could detect
19:05 Speaker 01 differences in the baby's behavior at three years old, depending on how much choline was given to them.
19:09 Dr. Mark Hyman? So should women take choline supplements?
19:12 Speaker 01 You don't need to. You don't need to, because it's much better absorbed from eggs, for example. So if you have four eggs a day, you're getting the bare minimum. Plus, if you have two other sources of animal food during the day, you're going to get to 700 milligrams, which is really high. You can supplement, especially if you're vegan and you don't eat any animal foods, you must supplement with choline. It's very important.
19:34 Dr. Mark Hyman? I mean, four eggs has 600 milligrams. But you were saying 900 milligrams and people don't really want to eat four eggs.
19:39 Speaker 01 I know, but it's important. I didn't really want to eat four eggs. I did it anyway because I was like, I need to get enough choline.
19:45 Dr. Mark Hyman? And you're saying it's better to utilize than taking oral choline?
19:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's better absorbed. Yes, you can also take supplements of choline if you want. In a lot of like sort of forward, cutting edge prenatal supplements, you'll find choline. But moms are not told about this, Mark. And actually, in formula, which is, you know, milk for babies, they put choline in there because they know it's important. But somehow, nobody's telling pregnant moms to also do that during pregnancy. Like, what's going on? Why is this information not being communicated? It's very confusing.
20:12 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, it's one of those things you bring up that was, you know, I was aware of, but it's something that, you know, most people don't know and doesn't get talked about. And most obstetricians don't recommend for their patients. And
20:23 Speaker 01 It needs to change.
20:24 Dr. Mark Hyman? If you can tolerate liver, I highly recommend it. Beef liver has, you know, a lot more.
20:30 Speaker 01 It's a very good source of choline.
20:32 Dr. Mark Hyman? Chicken liver is great. So I think that's, that's an important aha that I think most people will not know about. We kind of jumped over the glucose. There's four pillars. So I want to, I want to come back to the glucose thing because it's such a big thing. And we have such an epidemic of diabetes and obesity. And it's literally programmed in your genes if you eat a lot of sugar when you're pregnant. And it's not just sugar. It's anything that turns to sugar. So white flour, refined starches, ultra-processed food, it's, it's everywhere. It's, it's, it's almost impossible not to eat that if you're, you know, a pre-ranging human. And, and you have to
21:07 Speaker 01 You don't grow your own food.
21:09 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, if you have to be very diligent. You know, most people shop and buy stuff and they don't even aware of what's in it. And you go out to eat or you go to, you know, try to food grazing in the airport or, I mean, it's everywhere. Like, it's just amazing. You go to Starbucks and it's like, just sugar. You know, like, it's just sugar. And I went, I went to buy like a green juice. I'm like, oh, green juice. I mean, look, like 37 grams of sugar. That's how much almost as in a can of Coke.
21:34 Speaker 01 And that's way past the 25 grams recommended maximum amount by the WHO. There's a really cool thing that I want to share. So In the UK in nineteen forty, the government started a sugar ration. I don't know if you knew this, but for thirteen years, the entire population of the UK was given only, only forty grams of sugar per day. Versus before the ration, they were at about eighty grams per day, which is very high. But it was the war and they had to ration the, the import of sugar. And this meant that everybody in the country, including pregnant moms, all of a sudden dropped their sugar intake by half. And so recently, scientists looked back and called sixty thousand of these babies,
22:16 Speaker 01 who were born just at the end of the sugar ration or just after. And they wanted to see, did this small, very precise change have any impact on their health? What do you think happened?
22:26 Dr. Mark Hyman? Obviously, it did.
22:28 Speaker 01 So the babies who were developing in the womb during the sugar ration had fifteen percent less lifetime risk of diabetes compared to their peers who were born just after the ration ended, so who had moms who ate more sugar. So just by reducing your sugar intake by forty grams, you can be protecting your child from diabetes.
22:50 Dr. Mark Hyman? It's huge.
22:51 Speaker 01 Because what happens in the womb really sets you up for life. It's, it's the moment where your organs are being created, your metabolism is finding its set point. And something really interesting from the research market is I started to understand that the food you eat when you're pregnant sort of sends a sort of like postcard to your baby, telling him what world he's going to be born into. So if you're eating a lot of sugar, your baby's thinking, oh man, I'm going to be born into a world with so much sugar, I have to prepare my body for this. So insulin goes up, fat storage goes up, and you're priming your baby from birth to be more likely to get the sugar-driven diseases. It's wild.
23:27 Dr. Mark Hyman? But you also say in your book that it's not just diabetes or obesity that you're going to get or heart disease, that, that the high amounts of sugar lead to neurodevelopmental issues.
23:37 Speaker 01 Okay, so that's a big one.
23:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? And affect brain development and cause more inflammation in the brain.
23:40 Speaker 01 Let's talk about that.
23:41 Dr. Mark Hyman? And can lead to autism and ADD.
23:43 Speaker 01 Well, is associated with it. In your womb, your baby's developing all of his neurons and his brain cells. And there are these tiny little cells called microglia, which are in the baby's brain, and they're sort of like the rangers, they're patrolling. Oh, is this neuron developing properly? Is this one not okay? I need to go and kill that neuron because it's, it's not doing okay. These are immune system cells that are patrolling, surveying, and pruning your baby's brain as it develops. Now. When you have high glucose levels as a mom, your baby also has high glucose levels. That leads to inflammation. And scientists believe that high inflammation in the womb makes these microglia a little bit overactive because they respond to inflammation.
24:25 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, the glia are your brain's immune system.
24:27 Speaker 01 Exactly. So they start essentially pruning neurons they shouldn't be pruning. And this is why scientists believe, this is the leading sort of theory behind why we see that moms with gestational diabetes are slightly more likely to have a baby who has autism. So if we look at millions of mom-baby pairs, we see that on average, if you've had gestational diabetes, your baby has a 25% higher likelihood of developing autism. Now, I want to be very cautious here. I'm not saying that the diabetes is causing the autism.
25:02 Dr. Mark Hyman? It's association.
25:02 Speaker 01 It's an association. And the overall risk-
25:04 Dr. Mark Hyman? It was a strong one. What was the, uh?
25:06 Speaker 01 The overall risk is still low. So three in a hundred to four in a hundred. That's the overall prevalence, right? So it's 25% increase. And so if you have diabetes, in moms with diabetes, four in a hundred kids have autism versus in moms without diabetes, three in a hundred kids have autism. There's signal there. It's not necessarily causing it, but we know that high inflammation in the womb is not good news for your baby's brain.
25:33 Dr. Mark Hyman? I mean, just to put it in plain English, like if you eat a lot of sugar when you're pregnant, your baby's gonna have high risk of obesity, diabetes and heart attacks,
25:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:42 Dr. Mark Hyman? and maybe even neurodevelopmental issues and many other things. So really important. And you're the glucose goddess. You teach women how to eat sugar the right way.
25:52 Speaker 01 In a way that doesn't create more cravings and in a way that creates fewer glucose spikes. So it's protective for your baby also.
25:58 Dr. Mark Hyman? I mean, this is something called the glycemic load of a meal, which is essentially the way in which a meal in total affects your blood sugar. So for example, I always make the joke, if you put like, you know, three tablespoons of Metamucil and a can of Coke. It's going to not affect your blood sugars much because you've got all the fibers going to swell up. The sugar won't be absorbed as fast. So the matrix of your meal matters. Protein, fats, sugar. If you eat protein and fat, you're going to slow the absorption. You're going to mitigate the rise in blood sugar. You're going to mitigate the rise in insulin.
26:31 Speaker 01 And the inflammation.
26:32 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, the inflammation. So not that you can eat huge amounts, but it's not like don't eat anything. Right? So talk about how, what are the simple steps? And you've written about this in your other books. I think it's important because it's just for everybody and also especially for pregnant women. What are the, what are the like simple steps and hacks that you can use? So that you keep your blood sugar more even and balanced. And now we have these amazing glucose monitors, which really almost didn't really exist even on a widespread level. When you sort of, we started talking years ago and now people can see. I mean, I just as an anecdote, I got a glucose monitor. I want to try it out. It was kind of like, I don't know, three years ago or something. And, and I was at my friend's house with the summer and he, or he's like a food fanatic. He just only is perfectly clean, regenerative or organic, no sugar and nothing.
27:16 Dr. Mark Hyman? And he ordered this incredible meal from this farm in Martha's Vineyard. It was like lamb and veggies and, and we just gorged ourselves. Like we both had the blood sugar monitor on. We didn't eat bad things. We just ate a lot of things. We're stuffed and I do that occasionally, but not too often. And we both called each other like at, you know, nine o'clock at night and said, what's going on? Our blood sugar is like 160, which is crazy because both of us were thin, were fit. And so it's not just the, what you're eating. It's also the volume can, can be a thing too with blood sugar and so.
27:49 Speaker 01 Well, if you eat like, you know, 10 pounds of sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes are fine for you, but that's going to be a big glucose load.
27:55 Dr. Mark Hyman? Exactly. Right.
27:56 Speaker 01 Okay. So first thing we already mentioned, protein rich breakfast. Super important because it sets your glucose levels for the day. Second thing.
28:02 Dr. Mark Hyman? Wait, what is protein rich breakfast?
28:03 Speaker 01 Okay. So a breakfast built around protein. So good protein sources are, well, eggs, we talked about it. It can be some full fat dairy. It can be some leftover meat or fish from the night before. Crack it in the pan. You can use protein powder unsweetened if you want to make a smoothie, for example. You just want to make sure there's always a protein source. And honestly, for me, it's eggs or dairy. That's my favorite go to in the morning. I also like leftovers from dinner. It's an easy way to get some animal protein.
28:31 Dr. Mark Hyman? And you could like have, you know, full fat. Uh, Greek yogurt, which has more protein and you can add nuts.
28:38 Speaker 01 Yes.
28:39 Dr. Mark Hyman? Walnuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds, whatever.
28:41 Speaker 01 And some berries.
28:42 Dr. Mark Hyman? And some berries. So the more nuts you eat and now the more thick the yogurt is, the Greek yogurt has higher protein. So that's, that's important enough.
28:49 Speaker 01 And a key thing for breakfast also is to avoid anything sweet, except whole fruit, if you want for taste, right? But the base should be really the protein and the healthy fat.
28:58 Dr. Mark Hyman? And more French toast, huh?
29:00 Speaker 01 For dessert, Mark. You can have that for dessert. That's another hack. So if you wanna eat something sweet, if you wanna eat something sweet, have it for dessert.
29:08 Dr. Mark Hyman? Is French toast French?
29:09 Speaker 01 No.
29:10 Dr. Mark Hyman? Okay. Cause you're from France. I'm like.
29:12 Speaker 01 Well, it's like pan perdu. I mean, yes, we have a French version of it. I don't know if it was invented in France.
29:17 Dr. Mark Hyman? Okay.
29:17 Speaker 01 Did Americans just call it French toast?
29:19 Dr. Mark Hyman? Maybe.
29:20 Speaker 01 Cause we don't call it French toast.
29:21 Dr. Mark Hyman? And you probably don't call french fries, french fries, either.
29:23 Speaker 01 No. You know what we call French toast?
29:25 Dr. Mark Hyman? American fries.
29:25 Speaker 01 American fries. We call it pan perdu, which means lost bread. And I think, maybe it is French. I think we use sort of old bread. Yeah. So lost bread. Uh, so French toast or anything sweet, have it for dessert after a meal.
29:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? Okay.
29:38 Speaker 01 At any point, even if you're pregnant and you want a donut, have it after your lunch or after your dinner, not on an empty stomach.
29:43 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
29:43 Speaker 01 That's gonna reduce the glucose spike for you and your baby.
29:46 Dr. Mark Hyman? Okay.
29:46 Speaker 01 So that's helpful. Uh, move after eating. After that big feast, if you had gone for a one hour walk, you would have seen a much smaller spike.
29:53 Dr. Mark Hyman? Even 20 minutes.
29:54 Speaker 01 Even 20 minutes. Even doing 50 squats, uh, in the living room for fun would have helped because as you move, your muscles absorb some of the glucose you just ate. So you should have, uh, thought about that, Mark. Not very glucose goddess of you.
30:07 Dr. Mark Hyman? No, I was just so stuffed. I was like a stuffed pig and just needed to like.
30:11 Speaker 01 Well, if you're very stuffed, I have a trick. So you can, you can do calf raises. So if you were really stuffed after the meal on your couch, just do little calf pushups. You know what I mean?
30:20 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
30:20 Speaker 01 You go up and down on the balls of your feet like this and your calf muscle will soak up glucose that you just ate. Think about me next time.
30:26 Dr. Mark Hyman? So any finger pushups?
30:27 Speaker 01 Um, yes. So this is something that Mark Hyman just invented, everybody. Finger pushups, very effective for glucose spikes. You heard it here first.
30:37 Speaker 01 Another one, okay, put clothing on your carbs. So that means never eat your carbs naked. So if you want bread or. Pasta or rice or cookie, don't have them naked. Add some protein.
30:49 Dr. Mark Hyman? Cheese on a bread.
30:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, like cheese on bread, like almonds with your cookie, like a Greek yogurt with the donut, like chicken with your pasta. Always add clothing.
30:59 Dr. Mark Hyman? We're not recommending donuts here, folks, just.
31:01 Speaker 01 No, but you know what I mean.
31:03 Dr. Mark Hyman? I get the message.
31:03 Speaker 01 Listen, if you're gonna eat the donut, have some almonds with it. So those are some core hacks that you can use anytime.
31:09 Dr. Mark Hyman? I think that's important. Put clothing on your carbs, meaning don't eat them alone.
31:13 Speaker 01 It's the Metamucil and the Coca-Cola. That's what you're doing. You're putting clothing on the Coke. And one more thing I would say is try to start your meals with vegetables. Because studies show that if you eat the vegetables first at the beginning of your meal, you're creating this sort of protective mesh in your intestine that slows down how quickly the glucose from carbs arrives in your bloodstream. Yes, fiber, exactly.
31:34 Dr. Mark Hyman? There's been interesting studies on wine and, you know, and, and, and eating when you eat what in a meal and what that does to your weight and metabolism and, you know, and everybody knows that if you, if you are hungry and you have a glass of alcohol or wine or whatever, you'll feel a buzz. But if you wait till halfway through the meal and then you have the same amount of wine, you don't get the rapidity of this buzz and you don't get the same spike. So that's the idea. You're trying to lower the glucose spike.
32:03 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. You're just trying to lower the spike. And so if you fill your stomach with fiber at the beginning of your meal, you can eat the same pizza or pasta afterwards, but it's going to arrive more slowly into your bloodstream. Therefore, a smaller spike. Therefore, you get a smaller crash, so not more cravings.
32:17 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
32:18 Speaker 01 So you don't have to get rid of all the carbs you eat, but if you eat them in the right order, time, combination, you're not going to kick off a cravings roller coaster. Cause that's what I used to be on. I would have sugar in the morning and then at 10 a.m., at noon, at two, at four, at six, at eight p.m. I wanted more sugar. I was on a big roller coaster.
32:35 Dr. Mark Hyman? I think that's such an important thing that you just mentioned is the cravings. Because a lot of people believe that this is just who they are. I'm just like a sugar addict and I can't stop these cravings and there's nothing I can do about it. I remember once teaching a workshop and it was on ultra metabolism, one of my first books. And it was really about like balancing your blood sugar. And we had a very specific diet we had for them and we had protein shakes and we had green juices that were not sugary and. Broth and all this stuff. And, and this woman says like, look, I'm going to try to do the program, but there's no way. I'm like 50 years old. This is my whole life. I've never been able to not have cravings. I'm going to try my best, but like, I just telling you,
33:16 Dr. Mark Hyman? it's not going to work. Literally, the next day, she's like, this is amazing. I don't have any cravings. And I'm like, it's not that hard. It's like a day or two. And you sometimes will go through withdrawal, depending on how much you're eating. But you, you literally can break the cycle if you eat the way you're talking.
33:34 Speaker 01 And it wasn't, she was not somebody with cravings. The cravings were a symptom. I like to think of symptoms as messages. I like to think of symptoms as your body being like, hey, please, Jesse, stop with the sugary breakfast, you know?
33:46 Dr. Mark Hyman? Right.
33:46 Speaker 01 Those cravings were her body saying to her, you need to balance your blood sugar.
33:50 Dr. Mark Hyman? Okay. So we did blood sugar, we did choline.
33:52 Speaker 01 Let's talk about, you choose, we can do protein or omega threes.
33:55 Dr. Mark Hyman? Let's do protein. Because protein is like, you know, the new dietary guidelines just came out, and one of the big recommendations was eat protein, increased protein recommendations. And there's a lot of fast food companies that are just putting protein in foods. Like we put, you know, fiber or whatever. And tell us about protein.
34:10 Speaker 01 So when you're building a baby, you're building a human body from scratch. And the human body is very high in protein. So protein is not just muscles. People think protein is just muscles and bodybuilding. So many things in your body are protein. The collagen in your skin is a protein. Insulin, the hormones that, the hormone that keeps your blood sugar steady, is a protein. Your immune system is made of proteins. So proteins are key. And by the time your baby is born, if you exclude water, he is 50% protein. 50% protein. So you need to eat protein to build that protein in your uterus. So naturally, the amount of protein in your diet should increase. But this is not something that pregnant moms are told.
34:52 Speaker 01 And there's new studies, the fancy word for them is the indicator amino acid oxidation method. This is a fancy word to say, we now have better tools to understand how much protein you need to eat when you're pregnant. And it's more than we previously thought.
35:05 Dr. Mark Hyman? What's the amount?
35:06 Speaker 01 So first trimester, 1.2 minimum grams per kilo per day. Second and third trimester, 1.5 grams per kilo. And breastfeeding, one point nine.
35:16 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, and that, and that, by the way, mirrors the new dietary guidelines, which is one point two to one point six.
35:21 Speaker 01 And during pregnancy, you have to be cautious and really consciously think, okay, I need to be getting more protein. And also what's tough is that as pregnancy goes on, you have less space in your stomach, your stomach gets smaller. So it's harder to eat bigger quantities. So you kind of have to focus almost entirely on protein. That should be the main thing around which you're building your diet because that's the most important thing for your baby and for you. So increase the amount of protein that you eat. In animal studies, again, we can do many studies in animals around pregnancy, not so many in moms, as you can imagine. Cause we can't manipulate pregnant moms and see what happens. But in animals, what they find is that, again, having to do with epigenetics. If a mom has low protein intake during pregnancy, her baby is epigenetically programmed to have lower muscle mass.
36:06 Dr. Mark Hyman? Wow.
36:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, it makes sense. The baby's receiving not that much protein. So his body setting is like, we're not going to be born into a world with a lot of protein. I should keep my muscles small, prioritize essential organs. And we have dozens of decades of years of research on animals. When you reduce protein in the mom, the baby is born smaller with less muscle mass and a higher likelihood of disease later in life. Protein is key, and especially in these studies. If you keep calories adequate and you just reduce protein, this still happens. It's not, it's not about not eating enough, it's about not eating enough protein.
36:44 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
36:45 Speaker 01 And today, seventy percent on average of moms are not hitting the minimum protein requirements.
36:50 Dr. Mark Hyman? That's incredible, seventy percent. I mean, there's such a protein debate in this country right now. Because the new dietary guidelines came out and there's a whole group that are saying, we don't need that much protein. The previous recommendations were point eight grams per kilo. This is too much. There's no way we can feed the world with this. I mean, there's a lot of criticisms. And, you know, point eight grams per kilo was the amount. To prevent protein deficiency.
37:12 Speaker 01 Exactly.
37:13 Dr. Mark Hyman? So it's how much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy?
37:15 Speaker 01 Exactly.
37:16 Dr. Mark Hyman? It's like sixty milligrams. You know, how much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets? Maybe thirty units. Or how much vitamin D do you need to not get osteoporosis? Maybe five thousand units, right?
37:27 Speaker 01 And for water, it could be the same, right? Like, maybe one glass of water is enough to not die. But everybody knows you should be eating more than, drinking more than one glass of water a day. It's kind of the same concept.
37:36 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
37:36 Speaker 01 So we need protein during pregnancy because we're building another body.
37:39 Dr. Mark Hyman? So what did that look like?
37:40 Speaker 01 So listen, for me, that worked out to about a hundred grams of protein a day minimum. So I would have four eggs in the morning, which is thirty grams. And then I would just have protein at every snack and every meal. I built it all around protein. I have recipes in my book of all the stuff I ate. I was making this like supercharged snack almost every day. It was a skir, skir yogurt, which is high in protein, plus two scoops of grass fed whey. So that snack was about eighty grams of protein. And I was putting passion fruit and berries and sea salt and tahini and peanut butter. I had that every single day. The recipe's in my book.
38:15 Dr. Mark Hyman? Good.
38:15 Speaker 01 But eighty grams of protein right there.
38:17 Dr. Mark Hyman? I'm not pregnant, but I'm gonna eat that.
38:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. I'll send you the recipe. You could be pregnant, who knows? I'm kidding. And so, yeah, that was a great, that was a great snack. So just make sure you're eating enough protein. And you kind of have to spend time to measure how much you're eating. So in the book, I have a big table where you can note what you're eating and kind of see where you fall.
38:36 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, like four ounces of chicken is thirty grams. Four ounces of meat is thirty grams. Six ounces of fish is thirty grams. And protein powder, like whey protein is great if you're, it's an incredibly good thing. I use goat whey or originally raised whey. I mean, it's, you know, you want to get clean stuff that's not full of crap.
38:51 Speaker 01 And just remember, the amount of protein you eat is sending a message to your baby. So it's important to give him enough because otherwise things shift, you know? Your DNA, your baby's DNA might have a plan, but then depending on the amount of protein available, that plan changes and adapts and it can have lifelong repercussions.
39:06 Dr. Mark Hyman? So why, why is it important then for people to have higher muscle mass?
39:09 Speaker 01 Ooh, because muscle is the organ of longevity. Because having a lower muscle mass is linked to a higher risk of all cause disease, of all cause mortality. Muscle mass is not only a sink for excess glucose levels. It's also a beautiful metabolic organ that keeps you healthy, that keeps you vibrant and alive. It's very, very key. And it also prevents, you know, long-term frailty, breaking bones, which are a big risk factor when you get older.
39:34 Dr. Mark Hyman? I agree. In my book, Young Forever, I call it the currency of longevity.
39:37 Speaker 01 I like that.
39:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? I personally was a yoga teacher. I ran five miles a day. You know, I rode my bike. I, you know, I always exercised for the last 50 plus years. But I hated the idea of gym. I, when I was 50, I couldn't do 10 pushups. I didn't, I was intimidated because I was kind of skinny and tall and I, I didn't like to go to the gym with all these guys with giant muscles. And I smelled and it was like, I don't know.
40:04 Speaker 01 Sounds great.
40:05 Dr. Mark Hyman? And I thought it was just for meatheads and I had so much judgment about it. And then I decided I better get my act together because I was telling all my patients to do this. So at 59, I started working with a trainer and started, and I can, I can share a picture after, but like I, I had a picture of me when I was 26. And now when I'm 66, it's like a different body. And, and I, and I didn't think I could do it at this age. But at any age, you can start to do this. There's a book I gave my mom. She got very mad at me for her 60th birthday. It's called Growing Old. It's Not For Sissies. And it's all about these elder athletes because she, her thing was basically, she would say, every time I have the urge to exercise, I lie down till it goes away.
40:47 Dr. Mark Hyman? So, and she suffered from it. She lost so much muscle. She was so frail. She got osteoporosis when she was older. She, I mean, she, it was horror. It was her frailty and lack of fitness that killed her. It's so important. And what you're saying, and this was really, I didn't even know this data that, that you're saying is that the protein that the mother eats during pregnancy determines the limit of the muscle that the child can build when they get older.
41:10 Speaker 01 And you see this, right? You might have two friends and they have the exact same workout routine. They both lift the same amount of weights, but one builds muscle easily and the other one doesn't.
41:19 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
41:20 Speaker 01 So there's many reasons for this, but what was taking place in the mother's womb during pregnancy could be a factor in determining your epigenetic ability to put on muscle. This blew my mind when I saw it because imagine the ripple effect, you know, imagine. How much better life is if you can build a lot of muscle that protect you.
41:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah.
41:39 Speaker 01 So that's protein. It's really important. It's really key. And I don't think people talk about this enough. So as a pregnant mom, really, protein should be one of your main focuses. And then the fourth pillar is omega threes. I know you love omega threes. So DHA is an omega three fat that builds your baby's brain as well with choline. And in particular, what DHA does is that it helps guide the long arms of the brain cells that go and connect with each other. So it's really, really cool. And in lab experiments, you see that if you're trying to grow neurons in a, in a Petri dish, you have to add DHA, otherwise they don't connect with each other. And DHA is a fat that is made by microalgae in the ocean.
42:22 Dr. Mark Hyman? That's right.
42:23 Speaker 01 And then it's eaten by fish and it goes up the food chain. And us as humans, the way that we have it is by eating fatty oily fish. So salmon, anchovies, mackerel, sardines, et cetera.
42:34 Dr. Mark Hyman? Herring.
42:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, herring. The recommendation is 300 milligrams per day, which kind of works out to fish twice a week. Now, again, kind of like choline, you have the bare minimum recommendation, but studies show that having more than that could be even more beneficial for babies.
42:50 Dr. Mark Hyman? I mean, it's kind of crazy. If you look at the data, sixty, sixty eight percent of US adults have like deficiencies in vitamin D. And 95% have suboptimal levels. Ninety five percent. That's a huge number of Americans. So think of the amount of women who are pregnant, who have low levels of omega three fats. And it determines neurologic development, cognitive function, risk for neurodevelopment disorders, for metabolic health. It's so important.
43:17 Speaker 01 It's so important.
43:18 Dr. Mark Hyman? And the part of the problem is, you know, historically omega threes were everywhere. That's why humans had them. They were in all the wild plants. They were in all the wild animals we ate, all the wild fish. You know, if you eat a, you know, a deer or elk or bison that's wild, it's going to have a higher concentration of omega threes. Obviously, fish, it used to be the, it was such a valued currency. I don't know if you know this, but in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest. The Native Americans used these extremely oily fish. I forget what they were called, but they were like, they were like money.
43:50 Speaker 01 Huh.
43:50 Dr. Mark Hyman? They were so valuable. I don't think they knew about omega threes back then, but they just knew that it was such an important source of fat and food.
43:56 Speaker 01 And it builds the brain. And in studies, when you supplement moms with about a gram and a half of DHA per day, scientists can measure a four-point increase in the IQ of the baby at four years old.
44:16 Dr. Mark Hyman? It's huge.
44:17 Speaker 01 Can you imagine?
44:18 Dr. Mark Hyman? In Europe, you probably know this, but the formulas have DHA. In America.
44:24 Speaker 01 It's not mandatory.
44:25 Dr. Mark Hyman? It's not mandatory. And then very few companies have it. And there's a few who do. And I just interviewed a woman who started a formula company, part of the podcast. Bobby is the name of the company, and it has DHA in it.
44:36 Speaker 01 So why is it in formula, but nobody's telling pregnant moms to also take it?
44:40 Dr. Mark Hyman? Well, it's not mostly here. It hasn't been for years.
44:42 Speaker 01 Well, it's getting into formula in Europe, even in Europe. You know, I, my whole pregnancy was in France where DHA is in baby formula.
44:49 Dr. Mark Hyman? Right.
44:49 Speaker 01 But nobody told me to take it during pregnancy.
44:51 Dr. Mark Hyman? Right.
44:51 Speaker 01 Which is even more important than during breastfeeding and formula. So it's wild. And also there's another piece of information that's worth mentioning is that since the eighties, the rates of preterm birth, so baby being born too early, has gone up 30% in the US. 30% higher than in 1980, babies being born preterm. And one of the main links is the increase in omega six inflammatory fats and the decrease in omega three fat consumption. And in fact, and this is well established, when you supplement with omega threes, you reduce the risk of preterm birth. So all moms should be eating enough fish and also probably supplementing to make sure that they're getting enough for their baby, because the recommendation of fish twice
45:35 Speaker 01 a week doesn't significantly increase the amount of omega threes in your cells. Like really, you should be having more than that, like at least a gram.
45:43 Dr. Mark Hyman? I mean, part of the problem is that, you know, fish is really healthy until humans came along and poisoned the oceans through coal and burning of coal, which releases lead and mercury and other toxins. And then you get that in the oceans, sort of acid rain, it's metal rain, goes in the oceans. And the algae absorb it, then the little fish eat the algae and the bigger piece of the little fish and the bigger bigger fish eat the bigger fish and all the way up to the sharks, the swordfish and the tunas, which are laden with mercury.
46:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
46:14 Dr. Mark Hyman? And they're also extremely high in omega threes. So this is the problem.
46:18 Speaker 01 Well, it's actually not, I don't think it's that big of a problem because in the studies you see that during pregnancy, also anytime, the benefits of eating fish that are high in omega threes outweigh the downsides of the heavy metals. Like it's better to eat fish to get omega threes than to not eat them, even though today they're not as healthy as these.
46:35 Dr. Mark Hyman? I would agree. Just don't eat fish that eat other fish. Like eat the little fish, anchovies, sardines, herring, mackerel. Those are the best. Even wild salmon, if you're eating small salmon, it can be okay. But even grass fed, like we see everything, it kind of makes me crazy. Everything we see was organic. Everything was grass fed. Like there wasn't anything else, right? Everything was a pasture raised chicken. It didn't, we just, it was just normal, right? When my grandparents, you know, were alive, that's what they ate. And, and if you have grass fed butter, you get pretty good levels of omega threes.
47:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, but not as much as you get in fish. Like fish is.
47:10 Dr. Mark Hyman? For sure, for sure.
47:11 Speaker 01 And even farmed fish today, Mark, like they even supplement the fish with, do you say algae or algae in English?
47:17 Dr. Mark Hyman? Tomato, tomato.
47:18 Speaker 01 Okay, cool. So they even supplement the farmed with fish with algae oil to make sure they have high omega three levels. So even if the only thing you can get is farmed fish, it's still going to be beneficial.
47:29 Dr. Mark Hyman? Absolutely.
47:29 Speaker 01 So I did fish three times a week. Plus I supplemented with omega threes and omega three supplementation world is a whole other can of worms because you have to make sure it's like low in toxicity, et cetera. So in my book, I explain how to find one.
47:41 Dr. Mark Hyman? How to find a good one. But I do, I do think most women should take an omega three supplement. I do think they should take a vitamin D supplement. They definitely need obviously a prenatal with the right types of folate.
47:51 Speaker 01 Exactly.
47:51 Dr. Mark Hyman? And they also, so I probably need, you know, a T to not high in choline, like you said, but I don't know if is it bad to supplement choline?
47:58 Speaker 01 No, it's not bad. I did, actually. My prenatal contained choline. But nonetheless, you can't get everything you need from supplements. Like, you need to also make sure that you're getting it from food, because just the the format of the molecules is better absorbed by you and your baby. But the supplements are an insurance policy. You need to make sure that your diet is also containing all this important stuff. You can't supplement yourself out of a bad diet. You can't just eat, you know, McDonald's every day and be like, it's okay, I'm taking supplements.
48:23 Dr. Mark Hyman? No, you can't. You know, people do that. The same thing with stats. Oh, I can take, you know, whatever I want. I'm taking a stat, you know? Doesn't work like that. So your your book really lays out these principles. It gives people practical suggestions of how to do this. Recipes that are delicious, and it it doesn't guilt trip women, but it just educates them about what to do to actually help take care of their own bodies. And by the way, the diet you're eating is not just good for your baby. It's good for you, too.
48:51 Speaker 01 I felt great during pregnancy because I ate better during pregnancy than any other time, to be honest.
48:56 Dr. Mark Hyman? And how much weight did you gain?
48:57 Speaker 01 Eleven kilos.
48:58 Dr. Mark Hyman? Twenty two pounds.
48:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:59 Dr. Mark Hyman? Ish. That's normal. Twenty five pounds, the baby's like six, seven pounds. Like, you don't need, you got a placenta, you got fluid, you got other stuff. But, you know, some of them get forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred pounds. And they don't, like, there's a cultural framework that that's okay because you're pregnant. And I think it's really a mistake.
49:17 Speaker 01 Some of my friends were like, oh, when I was pregnant, I was gonna be fat anyway. So I just ate everything I could never eat otherwise. And I was like, this is actually really not a good idea for your baby. But we have so many myths and moms are not told about this stuff. And I think on the topic of guilt, it's important because as I was sharing this information on Instagram, I got a few DMs from moms like, oh, I feel guilty now. Like, listen, my opinion on this is that when you're pregnant, you're gonna feel a sense of responsibility. There's pressure, you're building another human, like, it's complicated. You might feel stressed, you might feel overwhelmed. I don't think we can take that away. But what Nine Months That Count Forever, the book, is trying to do is help you navigate the pressure in a healthier way. So you know, if you do these four things, you're really setting up your baby with a good, a good base.
49:59 Dr. Mark Hyman? And it's simple. It's really simple. It's really simple. Balance your blood sugar, eat more protein.
50:04 Speaker 01 Choline and DHA.
50:05 Dr. Mark Hyman? Get choline and DHA.
50:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
50:07 Dr. Mark Hyman? Pretty simple.
50:08 Speaker 01 Pretty simple. And I hope that this book becomes completely irrelevant very fast. Like, I hope everybody gets this. All doctors start talking about it, and this book is not useful anymore.
50:17 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah. No, I'm so glad you wrote it because, you know, as I said, I delivered 500 babies.
50:21 Speaker 01 Can you talk about that a little bit? Like, I want to know more about that.
50:24 Dr. Mark Hyman? About what?
50:24 Speaker 01 About delivering 500 babies.
50:26 Dr. Mark Hyman? It was amazing. I mean, I was a family doctor. I got trained in a community hospital in Northern California, where there was only family doctors. I learned to do C-sections. And then after my, and I actually was really interested in being in an internship. I went to this small town in Sioux State, Marie, Canada, no, somewhere. I don't even know where I was. I didn't remember. It was a little town. And it was 24/7. I lived in the hospital and just, I basically barely slept and just delivered babies nonstop for a month. And then, and then I went to work in a small town in Idaho called Orfino, which nobody had ever heard of, is a logging town with 3,500 people, no stoplights, and not even a McDonald's or any kind of, any kind of a chain of any sort.
51:06 Dr. Mark Hyman? And there was five family doctors and one drunk surgeon. I was probably the most highly trained in obstetrics and also in C-sections. I was a C-section guy. So I had to cover all my own patients and then I covered their patients. And so I was exhausted after four years, but it was an amazing experience. I mean, delivering babies is just one of the highlights of my whole career. I mean, it's such a joy. And, and I was very deliberate with my pregnant women about how to stay healthy and.
51:36 Speaker 01 So you totally talked to them about it.
51:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? A hundred percent. I didn't even know what I know now, but I, I studied nutrition in college. I was always a healthy eater. I, I really, you know, studied a lot about, about this just out of my own interest before medical school. And I actually took nutrition at Cornell. So I was really very aware of it. You know, it was one of the highlights of my career. And, and I was so frustrated that people just didn't understand this. And then they didn't understand how important it was to regulate their biology in a way that you're, you're in a sacred, you have a sacred duty here to create a little human. And how do you create a healthy little human? And that's what we're talking about here. How do you, how do you give your baby the best chance at a good and healthy life? How do you not program it by eating the wrong things or by not eating the right things? Yeah.
52:21 Speaker 01 It's about vulnerability.
52:22 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah. And this whole field of epigenetic research is so important. So I think, I think people are starting to become aware of it, but you're literally writing in the genetic expression software.
52:33 Speaker 01 You're the great programmer of your baby's DNA.
52:35 Dr. Mark Hyman? That's right. Yeah, so you can
52:37 Speaker 01 It's kind of a responsibility.
52:38 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, it kind of is. And I'm so I'm like, my dad, like my daughter is just like, I'm like, she just, you know, just recently became pregnant. So I'm like, oh God, what is she doing? She's in, she's exhausted. She's an orthopedic surgery resident. She's working 14 hours a day.
52:53 Speaker 01 You do what you can.
52:53 Dr. Mark Hyman? The hospital food is shit, you know, like, so I'm like, I can't catch you.
52:58 Speaker 01 Well, any small step that you can take is going to be beneficial. And also, you know, if you already had kids before you're learning about this late in pregnancy, it's okay, like your baby will be okay. I was on the cusp of prediabetes at 25 years old, even though I was eating pretty healthily, probably linked in some way to my mom's diet, but I was able to fend it off. You know, you're, you're able to work with your epigenetic programming and your vulnerabilities. But for my son, I was like, if I can set him up to not have, be on the cusp of prediabetes at 25, I want to do what I can to do that. So when you know more, you know, you change what you do. But just one part.
53:33 Dr. Mark Hyman? This is so great. So Jesse, people can get your book anywhere, Nine Months That Count Forever, How Pregnancy Diet Shapes Your Baby's Future. It's out now. And you also written other books, The Glucose Goddess Method and The Glucose Revolution. Where can people find you and learn more about what you're doing?
53:52 Speaker 01 The best place is Instagram, at Glucose Goddess. That's me.
53:57 Dr. Mark Hyman? At Glucose Goddess. Check it out.
53:59 Speaker 01 Thank you, Mark.
53:59 Dr. Mark Hyman? Yeah, thanks for being here. Thanks for coming all the way from France. Your baby, I hope is somewhere close by.
54:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
54:07 Speaker 01 He's back in France. He's fine. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
54:10 Dr. Mark Hyman? And, and I wish you the best of luck and thank you for raising the awareness around sugar. You know, I was beating that drug for a long time, but I wasn't as smart or as good as you at it.
54:19 Speaker 01 Oh, stop it.
54:20 Dr. Mark Hyman? So I thank you for doing the work and, and getting this out there, really.
54:24 Speaker 01 Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
54:25 Dr. Mark Hyman? Mark, a pleasure. If you love, when it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store. I've hand selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com.
55:10 Dr. Mark Hyman? Love this podcast. Please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.
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