Imagining a New Normal

As I alluded to in my post about chauvinism in paleo, I'm not terribly hot on transformation stories from people who lost a ton of weight and now look like supermodels as incentive to clean up one's diet. There are other, more enduringly compelling reasons to do that, but they're not nearly so sexy - literally or conceptually - so they don't get told as much. Three blog posts in the last three days are different.

GDM and the Ketone Boogeyman

This was posted yesterday to a Facebook group to which I belong:

Gestational Diabetes. Sister in law is 32 weeks pregnant. Doc is telling her she needs 150-250 carbs per day. Yet her glucose is still high pretty much all day and especially in the morning. She is doing finger pricks like 4 times a day and if she doesn't get her levels below 130, consistently, she will have to have other interventions. I know this can be helped with food...

Being of personal and professional interest to me, I went searching for resources and got busy with some synthesis. The trouble is, ancestral health (AH) sciences have not had a chance to penetrate into the corners of human health conditions yet, meaning the vast majority of relevant published literature focuses on AH issues in adult men, or CW methods of addressing obstetric conditions. There's also a long-standing tradition in medicine to view the adult male as the default physical model, leaving women - and heaven forbid pregnant women - as de facto pathology cases. Combining that conceptual substrata with the diabetic disease state sets off any number of ringing bells and blinking lights that promptly summon the heavy pharmaceutical artillery.

But if we took a step back and changed the underlying assumption to one more in line with AH, and accepted that the female also functions, and that pregnancy is a normal aspect of female physiology, what would we find?

Phases of Pregnancy

Not that you'll ever need to know this, but there are 3 phases of pregnancy: mine, ours, and baby's.