Obstetrics, Preconception,
& Prenatal Care

We highly encourage a preconception wellness assessment! Most women wait until getting pregnant to think about how to care for the body during pregnancy. At a minimum, we should be preparing at least 3 months prior to getting pregnant. For many women, there are important nutritional, hormonal, environmental, and genetic issues to address to maximize the chances of a healthy pregnancy. This preparation goes way beyond just taking a prenatal vitamin.

We offer additional nutritive testing and guidance that can have a profound impact on your baby’s development that is not included in typical prenatal care.

We know that lifelong health for a person starts as a baby in the womb, and mom’s knowledge of how she impacts this early development can change critical health outcomes for a lifetime!

We offer additional education for our patients before pregnancy and during pregnancy to teach you about critical wellness topics you simply won’t learn in the standard prenatal care approach!

We encourage all of our patients to explore their birth plan, understand how the birth process impacts your baby’s lifelong health, encourage mothers in their birth wishes, and maintain a low cesarean rate & support VBAC. We also remind you that how your birth process unfolds depends in large amount on your health attentiveness throughout your entire pregnancy!

We have an immense ability to impact the health of future generations through awareness of the importance of nutrition, stress, and environmental endocrine disruptor exposure during the preconception (and pregnancy) time. Preconception choices can affect your children via Epigenetic effects for the rest of their lives! This applies to both moms and dads.

While many of us are thinking about finances, preparing the baby room, the birth moment, and the new fun things that children bring into our lives, we also need to put 110% effort into maximizing the body’s ability to support the early and intricate development of the child.

• Understanding the best nutrient dense and phytonutrient foods to eat

• Maximizing digestion and good absorption of these nutrients

• Managing the stress response and state of mind

• Preparing the body metabolically and physically

• Avoiding environmental heavy metals and endocrine disruptors, and supporting biotransformation and elimination if needed

• Minimizing exposure to inflammatory agents, such as refined sugars/carbohydrates and processed food additives

• A little bit of knowledge and good advice in the above areas goes a long way in helping you to prepare during the first phase of parenthood: Preconception.

Just like the preconception time frame, we have an immense ability to impact the health of our children for the rest of their lives by knowing what to focus on during pregnancy. Consider the impact of epigenetic effects in utero on your child: We cannot control 20% of our genetic makeup (the actual DNA sequence), however we CAN quite remarkably control the other 80% of our genetics (how the genes are expressed) with attention to nutrition, blood sugar and insulin, toxin avoidance, detoxification, and other health factors.

The Epigenome essentially sits on top of the genome and tells our genes to switch on or off. The DNA sequence is not changed, but with the most optimal environment, the good genes are turned on and the bad genes are turned off. Even more amazingly, this can create a gene imprint that can be passed on from generation to generation.

Pregnancy is an important time to be aware of the impact of the epigenomic environment we provide for our children in utero! Learning about factors such as artificial sweeteners, prevalent GMO foods like corn and soy, inflammation from environmental exposures, chemicals in food and personal care products, hormones and antibiotics in animal products, and the rectifying qualities of a healthy microbiome and antioxidant and phytonutrient rich foods, goes a long way for the future health of your child.

Some of the biggest adjustments we go through in the postpartum time are adapting to lack of sleep and fatigue, breastfeeding, physical recovery (recovering your pre-pregnancy body), and blues and depression. Certainly, the better we maintain health before and during pregnancy with good nutrition, self-care habits, stress response management, and exercise, the better we will do with these changes after birth.

Breastfeeding has lasting effects on both your health and your child’s health. It promotes a healthy microbial balance and is hugely important for the development of the immune system (breastfed children have less asthma, allergies, and infections), which again, affects health for a lifetime! For mom, breastfeeding reduces the risk of breast cancer and persistent metabolic disturbance, not to mention all of the emotional and psychological benefits. At times, breastfeeding is impossible and alternative measures are necessary, however most of us can successfully breastfeed with some preparation and persistence – even with very busy life schedules. Important foods to know about for breastfeeding include free range eggs, wild caught salmon, blueberries, apricots, Swiss chard, spinach, fenugreek, dill, and plenty of fluids like water, herbal teas, and bone broth.

Breastfeeding does help some with post-pregnancy body recovery, however there are other important first steps to physical healing to know about. The most immediate exercises to focus on postpartum are diastasis recti recovery exercises and pelvic floor strengthening. We work with amazing pelvic and pregnancy/postpartum physical therapist to help you be proactive now to prevent problems down the road!

Your baby’s health for a lifetime starts in the womb, and we know you want to do the best you can for your child! We provide you with more information about health and prevention than you’ll learn in any other prenatal setting, office, or class – you’ll be surprised at what you are missing!

• Breastmilk is best, but if you don’t prepare correctly, you can actually excrete environmental toxins in your milk! We know you don’t want Toxic Breastmilk! Ask us how to prepare.

• The way you prepare your body and birth your baby affects the absence or presence of healthy bacteria in his or her body forever – this impacts the risk for allergies, digestive issues, metabolic issues, skin issues, and other conditions forever! Ask us how to pass on the heathy bugs (we call it the Microbiome) to your baby

• Food is medicine, and this applies to fetal development and prenatal health in a big way! Ask us how to nourish your baby in the best way that you can.

• The World Health Organization tells us that exposure to hormonally disruptive chemicals while in the womb affects lifetime risks of certain cancers, metabolic disturbances, infertility, and even childhood behavioral disorders and autism! Ask us how to decrease this risk for your child.