A Guide To Inflammation
It’s important to follow an anti-inflammatory diet in pregnancy. Cool. But why? What even is inflammation? And why does it matter in regards to pregnancy?
We’ll make this as simple as we can. If your cells are operating in an inflammatory state they’re red, hot, irritated and clogged. In this state, your cells can’t process fuel properly. They can’t eliminate toxins from your body and their ability to operate optimally is seriously inhibited.
Ok. How does one become inflamed? Eating poorly, stress, an overactive immune system and liver and kidneys that don’t want to play ball, all contribute to chronic inflammation in the body. Fatigue is the most common symptom of chronic inflammation. But there’s also joint and back pain, inflammatory skin conditions, fluid retention and irritability. Fun… Most of the time, we’re too busy to notice that this is going on, but pregnancy is a different story.
When pregnant, the body is under more pressure than normal because so much energy is being channelled into making a baby. It’s at this point you may start to feel the impact of cells that are only working at 50%.
The last trimester is the most important time to keep inflammation as low as possible in your body, because this is the time of the greatest pressure on our system - the physical growth of the baby is impacting on our organs, we have almost 50% more blood than usual, and the extra weight puts pressure on our skeleton. You are also in the process of prepping your body for birth. During birth we want minimal fluid retention as this will affect the baby’s passage through the birth canal, and maximum cellular health to optimise the flow of hormones as well as your energy and stamina during the labour.
Got it. So, what can we do to keep inflammation low? The biggest contributor to chronic inflammation in the body is the health of your gut. Get your gut right, and pretty much everything else flows with ease. This is why it’s sooo important to eat well, and put effort into healing your gut. We’ve written a whole article on gut health in pregnancy - check it out here <link>.
Thankfully, we can work to control inflammation through our diet. Gluten, dairy and sugar are the most inflammatory foods. No surprise there, right? We recommend keeping those food groups as low as possible, particularly your sugar intake, in the third trimester. Here’s what that looks like:
Leave cakes, biscuits, ice creams and soft drinks alone as much as possible.
Switch to a gluten free bread. Our favourites include the Venerdi Six Seed loaf or the Gluten Freedom Broken Black Rice and Polenta Sourdough.
Substitute pasta for gluten free options or whole grains like brown rice and quinoa.
Avoid dairy altogether. Simple swaps include using olive oil rather than butter, nut milks rather than cow’s milk, look for coconut yoghurt rather than normal yoghurt and leave out cheese during this period.
Cook as much as possible from our recipe section - all the recipes are gluten, dairy and sugar free!
And now to what you can eat! There aren’t any surprises when it comes to the most anti-inflammatory foods either. Fresh fruit and veges are the business! Include a serving at every meal and focus on veges more than fruit. Include both raw and cooked varieties. Basically try to cram your plate with vegetables at every meal - it’s the ultimate recipe for minimising inflammation in your body.
