Farmbrarian

A terrific book for those who want a healthy mom and baby.

We’re back! Sorry for the silence on the site. Erin and I relocated across the country (we’re enjoying Western Michigan nowadays) and were very busy with all that entails. Simply put, life got in the way, but we’re planning to get on track with books. I should note that going forward we might stray from the normal genre of books we normally post about. Quite frankly, we haven’t found as many in the sustainable agriculture genre worth bragging about lately, plus our interests might be morphing a little bit.

On another note, we could use some help sourcing and reviewing books. If you’re interested, contact us.

And now, a book!

I’ll just come out and say it: I’m a fan of Nina Planck. You might recall my review of her first book, Real Food, and now I’m featuring her follow up aimed at mothers and young (or unborn) babies.In Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two and Baby’s First Foods, Planck takes us from preconception through introducing first foods using her common sense, no-science-required approach. In reality, she does bring in some science, but she does such a wonderful job of making the science available without making it necessary. Truly, anyone can read this book.

It is important to note that Planck’s food recommendations are not those of your standard dietitian or obstetrician. Fortunately for me, I am not your standard dietitian, and the result is that I echo her recommendations to anyone that will listen.

So what does she recommend? For foods introduced to the baby for the first time, Planck suggests meat, liver, fish or roe, egg yolk, banana and avocado. This definitely stands in stark contrast to most standard medical care, which will suggest first introducing iron-fortified cereal, followed by fruit, then vegetable, then meat. The fact that iron-fortified, heavily processed cereal is a very recent food to humans should be enough to suggest it might not be a great first food for your baby. Indeed prior generations, perhaps your grandparents or great-grandparents, would have told you Planck’s recommendations are no big surprise, and they probably would have been appalled at the idea of feeding a young child a processed food instead of meat or vegetable. Quite frankly, the thought still appalls me today.

In addition to these non-mainstream recommendations, Planck discusses how to use diet to promote fertility, healthy pregnancy and lactation. She also discusses the ups and downs of her personal pregnancy story. This story alone is worth the read for would be mothers anticipating a natural birth. The book is a terrific read for anyone pregnant or contemplating trying, and also for anyone generally interested in human health and nutrition.

On Amazon or at your local library.

Click to find at a library near you!

Michael Pollan, author of the wildly successful The Omnivore’s Dilemma, presents readers with simple rules of eating healthfully in his new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. The mantra of his last book In Defense of Food (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”) forms the backbone of the new book, which features a collection of sentence-long personal eating rules. For example, “If it came from a plant eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t,” and “the whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

The book can be read in its entirety in less than an hour, which is certainly worth doing. Fans of Pollan’s work will not encounter new ideas, but rather a greatly abbreviated and cleverly presented reiteration of his work. The rules were either created by Pollan, submitted to him by those who read his request for food rules via a New York Times blog, or are long-standing, cultural ideas about eating.

This “eater’s manual” is an enjoyable read for all, but especially for those unfamiliar with Pollan’s work.

Click here to find at a library near you!

As a society we should abandon the industrial food system and eat food in its natural form, as put forth by mother nature. This is a strong conviction of Nina Planck, who spells the idea out over 352 pages in her book Real Food. Her arguments are convincing and very closely mirror those expressed by the recently famous journalist Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire).

Real Food presents a strategy on eating based on unprocessed food that is sensible and will be beneficial to those who implement it. Planck essentially places no restriction on foods as long as they are in their pure form. Pie made with lard in the crust and topped with cream? Certainly. She claims that the rise of health issues in Western culture parallels the rise in processing our food (many people however have drawn similarly competent, yet different parallels to the rise of Western diseases). She goes on to refute the longstanding idea that saturated animal fats and cholesterol lead to heart disease and obesity. Planck is not alone in this stance as there is a growing contingent in the field of nutrition who have shifted blame away from so called “bad fats” and cholesterol.

This book is a great read for anyone interested in nutrition and will likely encourage you to improve your diet. I strongly suggest you balance her views with those of other authors (new and old), because her ideas are far from scientific fact.

This book was sourced from the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Notable quote: “If beef and butter were to blame for heart disease, heart disease wouldn’t be new. We’ve been eating them for too long.”

Read this book if:

• You are concerned with the shortcomings of our industrial food system
• You enjoy the work of Michael Pollan
• You are a vegetarian or vegan and would like to hear a contemporary and somewhat compelling argument against your diet