The Hemp Connection:
strawberries

The relationship between nutrition and pre-eclampsia is getting stronger! Researchers have reported that using a multivitamin supplement containing folic acid in the second trimester of pregnancy helped to reduce the risk of pre-eclampsia. Personally, since folic acid is also recommended to any woman who is trying to conceive, I'd recommend taking it all the time instead of trying to guess when is the right time.

I've worked with many women trying to conceive, who have trouble changing their food habits. Some, out of fear of those changes or frustration at the challenge, give up, let the reproductive endocrinologist be the primary person fixing the problem, and figure they'll worry about their diet later.

Bad idea.

What you eat when you're preparing to become pregnant, while you're pregnant, while you're nursing, and while you're getting back into shape after all of that, are all vitally important. There's no such logical strategy as putting nutrition on the back burner, letting the doctor fix the problem, and worrying about the food later. It all fits together…and it affects more than just you!

By the way, good sources of folic acid include: lentils (right now is great weather for soup!),boiled collard greens (great if you're a Southern belle), chickpeas (whoo hoo for hummous!), papaya (always great in a fruit salad), frozen peas (easy to keep in the freezer), asparagus (this is the season when it starts getting cheap), broccoli (easy to keep around), strawberries (not a hard thing to have to eat), oranges (a winter favorite).

Wen SW, Chen XK, Rodger M, White RR, Yang Q, Smith GN, Sigal RJ, Perkins SL, Walker MC. Folic Acid in Early Second Trimester May Reduce Risk of Preeclampsia Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2008;198:45.e1-45.e7.

I'm not at all a fan of the Food Guide Pyramid or the new My Pyramid. I know too much about the politics of how each food got its position in the diagram. And I know that the concept is promoted by the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of Health and Human Services. So it's really about marketing commodities at least as much, if not more than, promoting healthy eating.

Last year at this time it occurred to me that eating patriotically (if you are a citizen of the United States, France, Chile, Czechoslovakia, and the United Kingdom, to name a few), is a fun way to think about what constitutes a healthy choice.

So I went to Google to see if there was anything under the term,"food flag". I found this:

Sausage and pasta were not really what I had in mind, so I scrolled further, and found this:

Absolutely not what I wanted to communicate!

So…I had a little fun and I made my own. I hope you like it!

I posted a bigger version on my website, feel free to use it as long as you keep the copyright notice intact in the lower righthand corner. You can find it at www.afterthediet.com/foodflag.htm.

And that is because I'm a strawberry nut. It's my absolute favorite fruit. I learned while researching this blog post that the average American eats 156 lbs. of added sugar a year…and only 8 lbs. of strawberries in the same time period.

Of course, the fact that you all are not eating enough strawberries means there's more for ME! Ha!

Seriously, though, this fruit is a wonderfully easy food to add to any diet. Put them in your cereal. In a smoothie. On waffles or pancakes. On top of ricotta cheese, sprinkled with almonds, on a Bran Crispbread. On a salad. Freeze them to eat like candy on a hot summer night. (That last one is my favorite.)

Strawberries are high in vitamin C, which is an important antioxidant. It's also important for the production of collagen, which keeps your skin looking young. As far as antioxidants go, it's the third best source of antioxidants when compared to the same serving size of other fruits.

And…did you know…even though they contain sugar, strawberries can also help reduce blood sugar spikes caused by other foods? I wouldn't recommend eating strawberries to counter a carbohydrate binge, but you certainly may want to consider including more strawberries in your overall diet as a way to make it easier for your body to handle carbohydrates. If you're enjoying the sweetness of the berries, you are likely going to want to eat less sugary food anyway, reducing your insulin load even more.

For those of you with high cholesterol, strawberries have also been shown to decrease markers of atherosclerotic disease. The benefits these tasty fruits provide far outweigh the sugar content many of you are concerned about.

One last thing, a recent study reported that organic strawberries are actually higher in antioxidants. So it may be worth it to spend a little extra, avoid the pesticides, and get the extra metabolic boost. If you don't have access to a farmer's market, look for the Driscoll's brand in your grocery store.

Basu A, Fu DX, Wilkinson M, Simmons B, Wu M, Betts NM, Du M, Lyons TJ. Berries modify the postprandial plasma glucose response to sucrose in healthy subjects. Br J Nutr. 2010 Apr;103(8):1094-7. Epub 2009 Nov 24.

Törrönen R, Sarkkinen E, Tapola N, Hautaniemi E, Kilpi K, Niskanen L. Strawberries decrease atherosclerotic markers in subjects with metabolic syndrome. Nutr Res. 2010 Jul;30(7):462-9.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/02/science/la-sci-organic-strawberries-20100902