OK, so these don’t really go together but I was reading a new book today and found some interesting factoids that I just had to share with you all.
I had a visit with my midwife yesterday and borrowed some books from her lending library. I felt like I had already read everything there but a couple of titles caught my eye. Your Vegetarian Pregnancy is written by an OB (obstetrician) who has been vegetarian since the age of 13. I guess she has attended over 5,000 births in over 25 years and is writing this book from those many years of experience.
She goes through the diet of vegetarians and reassures that a well-planned vegetarian diet can be more nutritious than a non-vegetarian diet. Duh!
But the what caught my eye was the part on genital birth defects for boys. It states that there is one birth defect that is five times more common in vegetarians than meat eaters and that is Hypospadias (relating to an English study done on 7,000 infant boys). It’s a defect where the urethra is positioned differently on the penis than where it should be. It’s not a major defect because the child can still urinate and won’t have his future sexual performance hampered by this but still. Don’t we all want our babies to come out perfect?
The cause of this phytoestrogens. If you remember one of my previous posts where I debated the pros and cons of soy milk, I talked about this. We already eat very little tofu/soy products because they are processed and we stopped drinking soy milk (which I only drank a small amount of daily) once we became pregnant. This shouldn’t increase our risk at all!
However, there was another group of women who experienced an equal increase in risk! Meat-eating, iron supplementing women! It turns out that taking iron supplements can increase your child’s risk of Hypospadias. Someone I know told me that her son was born this way and I know that she was taking iron supplements.
I really think that whole foods diets, which are well-planned to include a variety of healthy foods, is the best policy. I take a multi-vitamin but I don’t use any other supplements. But if I feel that I may be lacking in some area, like in iron, I adjust my diet to include more foods rich in iron (like broccoli or molasses).
And it is working well for me. This is my third pregnancy in four years (which could indicate depletion of key minerals) and yet ALL the results of my blood work keep coming back A-OK!
The last topic I wanted to breech today was pesticides. In the book mentioned above there is a section where someone asked whether vegetarians, because of their high intake of veggies and fruits, have a higher accumulation of pesticides in their bodies. The answer is actually NO!
When you wash your fruits and veggies you wipe off the bulk of these pesticides but meat-eaters, who characteristically eat less veggies and fruit, still have a higher concentration in their bodies. When pesticides are used, states Your Vegetarian Pregnancy author Dr. Holly Roberts, the soil in the fields remain contaminated for years. Animals ingest these pesticides in higher quantities (since they cannot wash their food prior to ingestion) and their flesh contains concentrations of pesticides which meat-eaters then ingest and accumulate. Dr. Roberts emphasizes this by saying that people who eat diets high in animals with fatty flesh (like Eskimos who eat lots of fish) have a pesticide concentration higher than any other group of people. Where the fish get all these pesticides I am not so sure but still…interesting right?
Anyways, I urge everyone to consider eating less meat. Vegetarians tend to live longer, have better hearts, weights and a multitude of other benefits. And if that isn’t enough to encourage you to cut back on animal flesh than think about what it will do for your sex life! Eating meat has been associated with erectile dysfunction disorders. Another reason why vegetarian guys are hotter!
