Prematurity is Preventable!
Amy V. Haas, BA, BCCE Last year the March of Dimes launched a multi-billion dollar campaign to promote awareness about premature labor and birth. They were trying to raise funds for research to find the cause and cure. I shook my head when I saw the ads. Practical prevention techniques were not mentioned only medical drug treatments. (1) Then I opened the latest issue of Medscape and noticed the primary focus of the report was prematurity. Prematurity, it seems, is on the rise in this country, in spite of our prosperity, supposed medical superiority and the billions of dollars spent by the...
Read MorePreventing Pregnancy Complications with Nutrition
Preventing Pregnancy Complications with Nutrition By Amy V. Haas, BA, BCCE Nutrition in pregnancy-a no-brainer, right? Who would think it was so controversial? Disagreement over a healthy diet during pregnancy continues to rage, with one side saying that what a woman eats will have no effect on her pregnancy and the other saying it has an enormous impact. So what’s a woman to eat? The fact is that research has been done on this subject, but with the exception of folic acid, it stopped somewhere around the 1980s when the focus shifted to drugs as the answer to curing all ills. The...
Read MorePreventing Gestational Diabetes
Don’t Risk Yourself Out of a Homebirth: Prevent Gestational Diabetes By Amy V. Haas, BCCE It’s the third class in my childbirth education series – the time when I encourage my students to ask about prenatal testing – and I’ve started to dread some of the questions about glucose tolerance testing. Most of the time, when someone asks about glucose tolerance testing, I discuss the history and refer them to Henci Goer’s book, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth. Typically, at least one person in the class decides they don’t want to be tested. That’s totally their right. But what happens...
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