Women's Health

Dietary supplements by definition do not treat, prevent, or cure a disease and cannot claim to on labels or in advertising. However, plant extracts are continually being studied for their potential to maintain health and affect the disease process.  Clinical trials are being conducted, aiming to figure out whether certain plant extracts could affect cancer-related biomarkers, act as beneficial adjunct treatments to be used with chemotherapy, or help to prevent progression of an early stage cancer or pre-cancerous condition. Read more

The potential problem here stems from your use of the word "vegan" diet and not "vegan-Nutritarian" diet because the anti-cancer power comes from the careful inclusion of the plant foods with the most documented benefits against cancer–G-BOMBS. For example, a very low fat, high carb vegan diet will not expose you to enough phytochemical benefits and will decrease their absorption. So the question is, where do the two cups of soy milk come into play in your diet? It is a processed food with limited antioxidants and phytochemicals, so if you are using it as a drink, it would make more sense to drink a glass of carrot, kale, lemon, tomato, and ginger juice. It is not that unsweetened soy milk is bad, but that it may reflect an overall lack of attention to the optimal choice of foods.

Avoiding all soy has no benefit for breast cancer patients and does not increase estrogen in the body. Unprocessed soy beans and tempeh are excellent foods. You should not eat isolated soy protein or overly processed soy products. Use miso sparingly and only low salt varieties. Tofu and tempeh are fine, and use unsweetened soy milk in limited quantities.

No, you should not. Eating one serving of fruit (whole cup) with each meal is fine. There are lots of false myths that circulate in the anti-cancer community. Even though foods with a high glycemic load are cancer-promoters, fresh fruit has a low glycemic load, especially when compared to white flour, sugar, white rice, and even white potato. Eating a reasonable amount of fruit, especially berries, has been demonstrated in scientific studies to protect and even reverse cancer.

I do recommend baby vitamin D drops too. You don’t want to take the chance because the vitamin D level is so important for their normal development, and it is not adequately passed in the breast milk if the mother is low or borderline. If the mother’s Vitamin D level is normal (I would suggest above 40 in this instance), then studies do show that the child gets enough without supplementing. So, I guess if you are really certain your blood levels are excellent, you can forgo the baby drops.

La Leche league can be very helpful. Sometimes it is just a matter of repositioning the baby or other things to help. In the meantime, a Nutritarian diet with about 4 oz. of seeds and nuts a day plus the DHA-EPA supplement works great to produce plenty of great tasting milk.

I would not worry about it because even the little bit of breast milk he is getting will be supplying valuable immunoglobulins and other beneficial factors. So, just keep encouraging him to nurse by nursing him when he is hungry instead of giving him food first. Use a breast pump once a day if you have to in order to stimulate milk production.

The key to preventing allergies is to introduce all the new foods that the mother is eating while nursing is continued. It is stopping nursing and then introducing new foods that increases the risk of allergies. That means, if you hold off until one year of age to introduce nuts after you have stopped nursing, you will be increasing the risk of nut allergy. The best thing to do is to introduce new foods early, not late, and make sure that you and the baby eat them together and the nursing continues well after all the new foods have been introduced. I strongly recommend that nursing be continued for 18 months.

It is best not to introduce honey to a young child at all. It is dangerous before a year but still an unhealthy substance that just fosters a desire for sweets. Peanut butter can be introduced at one year as long as you are eating it first and breast feeding is continued.

PCOS is more common in obese women, but 5% of lean women have PCOS. Most women with PCOS have insulin resistance, where the cells become numb to insulin’s call to let glucose into the cell. High insulin levels drive the ovaries to make more testosterone. Genetics also plays a role in testosterone levels. Forty percent of women with PCOS have a sister with it as well. Also, chronic stress can increase testosterone and insulin resistance.

A Nutritarian diet will reduce insulin resistance, lower testosterone levels, and reduce low grade inflammation associated with it. Eating high fiber foods, such as vegetables, fruits, and beans, increases the excretion of testosterone in the stool. Your daughter should avoid dairy, all refined foods, sugars, and unhealthy fats. She should include chia, flax, and hemp seeds in her diet. Regarding exercise, yoga has recently been shown to be more effective than other exercise in improving insulin resistance in PCOS.

I have seen a Nutritarian diet fix the hormonal abnormalities and resolve PCOS, even in thin people again and again. Even my wife was one of these individuals when she was young.

Hopefully nutritional changes can make a big difference in how she feels, and she will feel empowered to go all the way to superior nutrition and get well.

Having less frequent periods is not a health risk, and may actually be a health asset. Having only a few periods a year is sufficient. Many women who follow a Nutritarian diet typically skip many months, especially when they are exercising a lot on top of their excellent diet. Likely your lower body fat and degree of physical fitness interferes with the hormonal surges necessary for periods. That does not mean you are not ovulating or can’t get pregnant. I don’t think you should be concerned about this, as long as you have a few periods each year. If you are not having any periods we could address that issue in the future by reducing exercise a bit and gaining a bit more body weight.

The metabolism slows with aging and you need more micronutrients, but fewer calories. So you have to eat less, but very healthfully, and avoid recreational eating. You keep your hormones safe and low by eating properly and keeping slim. During peri-menopause and the early years of menopause, many women struggle with unrelenting stress from trying to do too much. As a result, cortisol, a stress hormone, is continually elevated, which is associated with increased belly fat. Chronically elevated cortisol increases hunger, raises blood sugar, fosters fat deposition, increases insulin resistance, lowers thyroid hormones, estrogen, and progesterone, and essentially ages us prematurely. So, along with diet, other self-care strategies should help, such as good sleep, regular exercise, yoga, and other enjoyable activities. If you are insulin resistant, your diet will resolve this and reduce abdominal fat over time.