Pregnancy and diabetes

No - I am not pregnant, and certainly not planning to become pregnant either. Two kiddos are more than enough, thank you very much! Closed chapter, over and done with. Getting on with my life and hoping to finally be diaper-free within the next months! But still, pregnancy and diabetes just suddenly appeared as a topic for my blog. And this is a topic I know zip zero absolutely nothing about. Still, I will reflect on it, as I just met a friend who has recently been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.

Those of you who have followed my food journey should be aware of by now that I do not give much for the dietary recommendations coming from state authorities these days. I am in a conflicting situation on what to believe when it comes to what to feed my children, and I am trying to use common sense, as well as reliable sources to come to terms with this lack of knowledge. When I was pregnant, nobody made me drink half a liter of sweetened water to determine my insuline level. Today that is standard procedure. My kids came out normal anyhow, and the midwifes always praised my pregnancy health card for having "the best values in town". Still, considering my chocolate addiction and food indulgance, I still wonder up to this date what the real result of my insuline level would have been in such a test...

Today, I was confronted with the questions of how I would have reacted if the results would have indicated diabetes. Considering my (then) non-critical standpoint to health care recommendations, I would probably only have gone with the flow. But would that have kept me and the baby safe? Would I have been able to manage my sugar cravings as necessary based on those recommendations? I doubt it. After having done a low carbing detox finding my balance, I now know that the reliance on carbohydrates wasn't an easy-fix problem. It really required a complete makeover of how I think about food, and particularly of what I put in my mouth. A short list of what to eat and what not (without increasing saturated fat) would not have helped.

But what about if I would have been in the situation that I am in now. Knowing far too much for my own good.... what would I have done with the diagnosis and the contradicting recommendations? Answer is: "dunno". Because it is one thing mixing with your body, doing total makeovers when the only one affected by your experiments is yourself. But it is a whole other deal if another creature's life and future health depends on the composition of nutrition going through your body... But one thing is for sure, I would have started to research the web to form my own enlightened opinion and only after that decided how to act, hopefully in agreement with an enlightened medical doctor.

To see what I could find on the topic, I turned to some of my most respected blogging nutrion experts and this is what I found:

Maria Health: Crackers and Facts on Gestational Diabetes

Wellness Mama: Optimal diet and nutrition for healthy pregnancy

Mark's Daily Apple: I started to take measures into my own hands

And from a blog that I am not familiar with but which sums it up pretty well: Primal Pregnancy (and no, I am not sure if I would go completely primal/paleo, but the information is worth digesting!)