Two Must Have Books for Pregnancy and Baby Nutrition

I received a couple of incredible books for review lately. I am thrilled to share them with you. They are so important. Beautiful Babies helps mothers understand nutrition for pregnancy, breastfeeding, and early feeding. Super Nutrition for Babies is all about how babies should really be fed – rice cereal not included!

Beautiful Babies

Kristen Michaelis is a compelling writer. She is fun, witty, and truly a nutrition geek – as she calls herself. Her book is fairly short – the second half being recipes – but it is concise and convincing. The recipes are great and the full color photos are mouthwatering. The recipes include Paleo versions of common meals and condiments but mainly focus on the foods that pregnant women need to eat – bones, liver, butter, eggs, oysters (my personal favorite), and even heart! She actually shows you how to use the traditional foods she promotes.

The book is geared towards the beginner. And in fact it is remarkable in that way. She doesn’t go into too much technical depth that women new to Paleo don’t want to bother with. She covers all the bases without boring the reader with too many details (save that for me – your trusty beater of dead horses!). Books like these will help change the world, one pre-conception/pregnant woman and baby at a time.

Within the first few pages she’ll have you convinced that eating traditional foods is the way to go – if you aren’t already convinced. She talks about gene expression, fertility, and avoiding chronic disease right off the bat. She then explains what to eat and what not to eat. She points out the things that most Americans eat everyday like MSG, additives, GMO foods, modern vegetable oils, industrial dairy, and factory produced eggs. While it may seem to some like she cut out just about everything, she adds back just as much delicious and nutritious food as the harmful stuff she nixed. She also goes over breastfeeding, gut health, and nutrition myths.

Super Nutrition for Babies

My favorite thing about this book has got to be all the pictures of old nutrition ads, where even the packaged food is full of animal fat and meat, and all of the children’s faces are broad and fat – like they should be. Of course, this was back in the day before heart disease rates started rising, and before most of the chronic diseases we know today skyrocketed.

This book is so important. I hope that one the old advice she reminds us used to be the norm comes back in vogue. There is hope in healthy children.

The book promotes high fat, high nutrients, and a preference for animal foods over vegetable. Katherine Erlich, M.D. talks about what’s wrong with the foods we eat today, why conventional first foods are destructive, and how, what, why, and when to feed babies the right food – the right foods being things like lightly cooked egg yolks, grated liver, cod liver oil, avocado, meats, and so much more.

Her advice is spot on. She advises feeding the foods I myself fed to Evelyn when she was a baby and toddler and am again starting to feed Maya. I am happy to have this book on my shelf and look forward to passing it on to ALL women I know with babies.

After reading this, I mixed up some pumpkin, chicken, and broth while in Colombia. For the most part Maya prefers eating bites of meat, fish, and eggs, but this was the first mashed baby food she really liked.