Preventing eclampsia : an interview with Tom Brewer, MD

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Nov, 2004 by CJ Puotinen

After I finished my five-year contract with the clinics of Contra Costa County, I stayed on and worked with the people who were hired to do a statistical study. I'd spent two years in Richmond, then two years at the county hospital in Martinez, and then went to Pittsburgh, California, so I had worked at all three of the major county clinics. The data showed improvement in every category. There was a period during which the Pittsburgh clinic continued to use conventional methods while I used nutrition in the Richmond and Martinez clinics, so we used the Pittsburgh clinic as a control. The Pittsburgh clinic had 10 times more hypertension in first pregnancies than the Richmond and Martinez clinics. Those findings were published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine as a preliminary report. (51) A team of eight government researchers spent three years going over 5600 cases. They studied every blood pressure reading, every urinalysis, and every other test recorded on the charts, and they verified our results.

Throughout my 12 years in these clinics, I met face-to-face with about 7,000 pregnant women. Many people came to sit in on my lecture discussions to see if I was a charlatan, nutrition faddist, quack, or nut. Some of these visitors were from Planned Parenthood, March of Dimes, State colleges, or UC Berkeley, or they were public health nutritionists. At the end of the discussion, after the patients had left to be examined, someone would always say, "That's a very nice presentation, Dr. Brewer. Your advice isn't likely to kill any pregnant mom or fetus. But do you think these people can understand it and apply it in their daily lives?" My patients might have been poor and mostly black or Mexican, but they got my message.

Five years after one woman gave birth to a healthy 8-pound baby, she came back because she was pregnant again. She told me that when she was there the first time, she was illiterate, but she had since gone to school and learned how to read and write. I was very happy for her, as that was quite an achievement. Then I asked her what I had told her to eat, and she rattled off the list that had kept her healthy five years before. I said, "Isn't it amazing? Even when you didn't know how to read or write, you knew more than most professors at the University." And that was the truth.

Q: What about high-risk patients, like women who are overweight to begin with?

Dr. Brewer: They're at risk only if they starve themselves trying to lose weight. Developing babies need a certain amount of nourishing foods every day, and that's what my diet provides. Many overweight women lose weight or keep from gaining weight while maintaining a healthy pregnancy just by focusing on the right foods. Average-size women often gain as much as 50 pounds on these foods. That's what Catherine Zeta-Jones did when she gave birth last April to a 6-pound, 12-ounce baby. Pounds of weight gain or loss are not the essential question for the health of mom and baby. What matters is the adequacy and quality of the food the mother eats, the amount of water she drinks, the amount of salt she consumes, and whether she avoids harmful drugs. Women who eat well and gain 40 or 50 pounds usually lose the weight soon after birth because much of the weight gain in a healthy pregnancy is due to the mother's expanded blood volume and the weight of the baby, placenta, and amniotic fluid. But if you gain weight eating junk food, the baby can't use any of it for nourishment and it gets stored as fat, which is much more difficult to lose. I used to see women at the charity hospital who lived on sugar and starches, which are empty calories. They were overweight, but they gave birth to underweight babies, and they often developed toxemia. I had a 400-pound patient once who ate six candy bars every morning for breakfast. She was at risk not because of her weight but because of her terrible diet.