PRIMITIVE PREGNANCY DIETS

The provision of special pregnancy and preconception diets to mothers-to-be was a universal characteristic of the healthy traditional groups studied by Weston Price. In some cases, these groups provided special preconception foods to fathers-to-be as well.

All groups that had access to the sea used fish eggs; milk-drinking groups used high-quality dairy from the season when grass was green and rapidly growing. Some groups used other foods such as moose thyroids or spider crabs, and African groups whose water was low in iodine used the ashes of certain plant foods to supply this element.⁵ These foods were added against the backdrop of a diet rich in liver and other organ meats, bones and skin, fats, seafood and the local plant foods.

Fish eggs are especially rich in cholesterol, vitamin B₁₂, choline, selenium, calcium, magnesium, and omega-3 fatty acids. They contain a modest amount of most fat-soluble vitamins but their vitamin K₂ content is unknown (see Figure 1).⁶

The Maasai only allowed men and women to marry after spending several months consuming milk from the wet season when the grass was especially lush and the milk much denser in nutrients. Maasai milk is higher in fat and cholesterol and lower in sugar than commercial American milk. The highest quality Maasai milk used for preconception diets, however, is even richer: compared to commercial American milk, it has over twice the cholesterol, nearly three times the fat, and over five times the quantity of phospholipids (see Figure 2).⁷ The phospholipid content is particularly important. Since most of the choline in milk is contained in phospholipids,⁸ this means that high-quality Maasai milk is probably about five times richer in choline than the milk you would find in the grocery store.

Compared to grain-fed milk, grass-fed milk is much higher in fat-soluble vitamins, pigments, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and omega-3 fatty acids.⁹ Price showed that the content of vitamin A, activator X (which we now believe to be vitamin K₂), and essential fatty acids markedly increased in butterfat during the rainy lush season.¹⁰ As the quality of grass increases, we can presume that the content of other grass-related nutrients—such as pigments, vitamin E and CLA—will also markedly increase in the milk.

Although modern science still has much research to accomplish in order to fully elucidate the value of traditional wisdom, it has already confirmed the fact that many of the nutritional factors that we now recognize as the most important to healthy embryonic and fetal development are the same ones emphasized in traditional pregnancy and preconception diets.