Postpartum Nutrition Q&A: What to Eat, How Often & What Actually Helps Recovery

Ceridwen

Welcome back to the Postpartum Prep Podcast. My name is Ceridwen. I'm your podcast host and your guide to preparing for a smoother start to life with your new baby.

Today on the Postpartum Prep Podcast, we are joined by Lily Nichols, and we just recorded a whole episode about preparing for postpartum nutrition. And in this episode, Lily is going to be answering a few of your questions about postpartum nutrition. So the first question that we have for you, Lily, is someone asks, I'd love your opinion on freezing raw beef liver to ingest like a pill.

Have you ever heard of that before? I've never heard that before.

Lily

I have. Okay. Yeah, people come up with all sorts of creative ways to try to get some liver and organ meats in them.

I have, I mean, for what it's worth, I have tried this option and maybe it's just because I don't love swallowing pills. I find it pretty repulsive to do. So it's not my favorite option.

If you are going to do it, though, just really, you know, there is a concern about food safety here. We're talking raw animal foods, you want to make sure that liver is from like a super healthy grass fed animal. Like I would only do this if I was getting organ meats direct from the farm and like prepped hygienically, kept cold the whole time.

But, you know, as you're processing it and getting into the freezer, it's fine if you, if that's really your, you know, the only way to make it work. I think it's a lot easier if you like really don't want to eat liver to do a desiccated liver like capsule or powder. If you do it as a capsule, you just take it like a pill.

Usually it's the doses, several pills or more per day, depending on how much liver you want to ingest. I do recommend the equivalent of about three to six ounces per week. So you'll have to contact the manufacturer to see like how, what the equivalent in fresh, you know, raw liver that is.

Um, my preference though for eating liver is I will make a big batch of pate and then freeze it into either ice cube trays or four ounce mason jars. And then I add the equivalent of about three, four ounces of pate to one pound of ground meat when I'm making some sort of a dish with ground meat, something that has spices in it because the flavor of the spices will also help hide the flavor of the liver. But in that way, you're just adding like a depth of flavor to the recipe instead of tasting like liver and it's fully pureed.

So it mixes right in, like you're not getting like chunks of it, so to speak. So I do that. Like if you have real food for pregnancy, there's a recipe for grass fed beef meatloaf that has hidden liver.

There's some meatballs that have hidden liver. You could add it to chili, to bolognese sauce, to kind of like a curried recipe. I believe in real food for pregnancy, I have like a curried, like stuffed bell, baked bell pepper dish.

I think. It's been a while since I looked at the recipe section, but anything where you have some interesting spices in there, like you don't even notice it. And if the flavor is still like too much, try going with chicken liver instead of beef or other like ruminant animal liver as like a much milder flavor.

So that's my preference, but everybody has their thing. So if you go that route, just keep food safety, you know, top, top of mind.

Ceridwen

I like to freeze my pate in, I know everyone has like different feelings about Ziploc bags and the plastic, but, you know, I wait till it's cooled down and then smooth it out completely flat. And I use a knife to kind of like score it. So it creates like a little, just a little square that you can break off.

And if you want to put it in like a single serving, like a bowl of soup or something, and because it's so thin, it just like heats up and dissolves straight away. I found that really helpful for just like, if I need a quick, yeah, if I want to get it quickly.

Lily

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Usually I'm doing like, if I have it in the ice cube trays or a mason jar, when I take out my ground beef frozen from the freezer, and I know I'm going to make that dish, I'll also take out a cube or a jar of pate and just defrost at the same time. But that's a good idea.

Ceridwen

I know. I'm thinking yours is a good idea because I'd never thought to. So yeah, kind of the portion that you would want to add to like a whole thing of ground beef.

I think I might start doing that. The next question that we have is, how often should you be eating if you're breastfeeding? Or I guess, is there any amount that you should be eating?

Lily

As often as you're hungry, honestly. So the thing about nursing is that every time, every feeding session, you're excreting a lot of energy. Like most of the energy that's expended by mom is actually what's excreted into the caloric content of the milk that baby is consuming.

You're just excreting, that milk has calories, it has energy. And that process of making milk, as you're making it on demand, you're pulling from all different fuel sources, glucose being one of them. So many women drop a bit hypoglycemic when they're nursing, hence being hungry all the time.

You can mitigate that a little bit by eating more protein, more fat, not just carbs. If you're eating just carbs, you'll be on a crazy blood sugar rollercoaster and really hungry all the time. So try to find that kind of balance in your macronutrients, that goes a long way.

And if you are eating more protein forward, you might have the satiety to get by with fewer snacks. However, I am a huge fan of mindful eating. So knowing all these things about macronutrients and blood sugar, how long they sustain you and whatnot, whenever you're hungry, eat.

So I think it's really helpful. Some women have a snack cart or something nearby, a place that you're typically sitting down to nurse, have your water or electrolyte beverage or tea or broth or whatever right there, and then also have some shelf-stable snacks. So maybe you have some nuts and meat sticks and jerky and, I don't know, snacks that are protein bars, dried fruit, have a mix of things there that you can snack on if you are hungry.

Oftentimes I find that nursing moms are eating at higher intervals because you're expending so much energy all the time. I even kept snacks by my bedside if I got hungry in the middle of the night. So whenever you're hungry, go for it.

Ceridwen

And same for drinking, keeping some water or whatever. Do you have an opinion, sorry that I'm adding a question in, but do you have an opinion on electrolytes for breastfeeding moms?

Lily

I think it's very helpful if you have them. I didn't really, electrolyte beverages were not all the rage when I had my first baby and so I wasn't doing like isolated electrolyte replenishment beverages beyond something I might make myself like a little, you know, lemon water, a little bit of fruit juice diluted and a whole bunch of water and a pinch of salt, like you can make your own. Coconut water, you know, is a good one.

With my second, those had become a lot more popular. There were better options than like sugary dyed Gatorade, right? So I do think they are very helpful.

Anecdotally, I hear from a lot of moms where their supply is better maintained when they're doing electrolyte replenishment drinks versus just plain water. You are also excreting electrolytes every time you nurse as well. Um, so I, I do like them.

I have an article on my site on, it's called electrolytes in pregnancy, but the same applies for lactation with a couple of different options that I like several brands. So whatever is available to you. I mean, I prefer the ones that are low to no sugar.

You can always, you know, yes, you need some carbohydrate or sugar to best absorb electrolytes, but most of us are eating plenty of carbohydrates in our diet that we don't have to be adding extra every time we're having an electrolyte drink, but you do want that. You could also just add, you know, a splash of coconut water or fruit juice or something to it would get you that little bit of, um, natural sugar to help maximize absorption of your electrolytes. I think they're great.

And if you're not doing electrolyte beverages, um, I think that's why we see so much broth and soups because those are electrolyte rich. You're getting some of the minerals that come out of the bones. We're assuming bone broth here, but also it's seasoned with salt, which is important.

And then if you're getting some potassium rich, uh, vegetables in there, you're getting potassium in there as well.

Ceridwen

Um, our next question actually is about bone broth, but I'm thinking because we just mentioned there's electrolytes in bone broth. Um, could we ask before we get into this next question, can we just talk a little bit about why bone broth is recommended often for postpartum women?

Lily

I mean, you see it all over the map, like all over the world and their postpartum practices. There's some sort of soup or stew or broth. Most of it is using parts of animal bones or the whole animal.

Like you'll see pig's feet soup in China. You'll see chicken soup in Mexico made with like the whole chicken, like head and feet attached. You know, you're getting, when you're using all those parts, especially like the bony connective tissue parts, you're getting a huge amount of collagen protein in there.

And that is really helpful for healing wound healing. So your, even if, even if you didn't have any like physical wounds, like a tear episiotomy surgical wound, you have the internal wound of where the placenta was attached. Your, if you gave birth vaginally, your perineal tissues all stretched like a lot for baby to come through.

And so there's micro tears in there that need to heal your skin stretched crazy amounts during pregnancy. Like it's just beyond belief how big the belly gets. Right.

And so for the skin to remodel, you're also needing collagen for that process. So I think probably the major reason, I mean, you could pick and choose from many of them, but I think one of the major reasons it was considered so important traditionally and like logically make sense from a scientific perspective is the collagen. Your uterus is also as your uterine uterus shrinks down, you know, as a size of a watermelon now shrinking down to the size of a pear, you have massive collagen turnover happening in your uterus.

In fact, a woman who has ever given birth in her life has higher collagen content in her uterus than a woman who never gave birth because of that remodeling process. Like it's, it's built back and like built back even stronger than before. So I think, you know, you're also allocating collagen resources to that, to like all of the connective tissues that had to stretch.

You think of like that round ligament pain that some women get that's because that's that ligament is being stretched so much. That needs to remodel and repair.

Ceridwen

And so this is what, sorry, this is the collagen and bone broth can help with all of that tissue repair.

Lily

Bone broth and like any, any slow cooked, tough cuts of animal foods, whether it's in a broth setting or just like a slow cooked meat stew sort of thing, pulled pork pot roast. Yeah.

Ceridwen

Thank you for explaining. I wanted to explain that because I didn't, because we had mentioned it was helpful for electrolytes, but, um, I wanted to also give like some other reasons why you might have bone broth postpartum before we get into this next question, because this next question says, um, it's from, she says she's vegetarian and she's wondering if there's an alternative to bone broth that would have the same benefits for postpartum.

Lily

So the electrolyte component certainly could do vegetarian, um, you know, no, no issue. Um, so go over to my electrolytes article on my site. You'll see like, not only am I talking about electrolyte replacement products, but I also have food sources for all of them.

And there are vegetarian sources for, for all the electrolytes. Um, the collagen being an animal protein, you're not going to, you don't find like vegan sources of collagen per se. Um, of course our body does make collagen.

So when you see like vegan collagen supplements, they don't contain collagen, but they have like collagen precursors to help your body make more of it. Um, probably your best option is to go as, as high as you can in protein in your vegetarian sources of protein. So your body has like an abundance of other amino acids to be building, um, your collagen internally.

Um, you know, especially now vegetarian, I'm going to assume you also eat eggs and dairy products. Those would be really helpful for boosting, uh, the, the protein intake, but I would also, um, highly encourage legumes. Legumes are one of the higher, um, glycine, um, plant sources.

Seaweed also has some glycine in it. So I would be, I would be aiming for more of those. And then vitamin C rich foods help with, um, kind of strengthening your, your collagen cross-linking.

Um, so it's not quite the same. We're kind of like trying to provide the precursors for it. There's also, you know, sometimes when I talk to women, they kind of reassess what are my reasons for being vegetarian and vegan and do those still apply right now or at this life stage.

And some choose to make some exceptions and add in some animal foods during that time, which is also an option. So you can get Marine sourced collagen. Um, a lot of the brands that do that it's made from the like discarded, um, skin and scales of wild caught cod is generally the, the major source that they're getting it from.

And so for some vegetarians that are doing it for, um, ethical reasons, we'll feel okay doing that because it's already from animals that were already harvested and you're using a part that was just discarded. So I'll throw that out there as an option. You could do a Marine collagen source if you wanted.

Ceridwen

That's great. Well, thank you for answering all our questions today and we've come to the end of our Q&A. So thank you again for joining us on the Postpartum Prep Podcast and anyone, if you're just finding this episode, be sure to head on over to our main episode where we did a full deep dive into nutrition for postpartum.

Thank you again so much, Lily, for joining us today and thank you all for listening.