Preventing eclampsia : an interview with Tom Brewer, MD

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

Environmental factors are much more likely to pose a risk to women and developing babies who don't receive enough nutrition than they are to fully nourished women and babies.

Q: Scientists recently announced that certain proteins secreted by the placenta rise significantly in mothers experiencing eclampsia, suggesting that these proteins cause eclampsia. (80,82) Are these findings significant?

Dr. Brewer: Research that's focused on "genetics" or speculative biochemical enzymatic equations never addresses the underlying cause of an illness or condition. I don't doubt that unusual proteins are produced by a starving fetus or a starving mother, but those proteins don't cause eclampsia. They're just another symptom. Inadequate nutrition causes eclampsia.

In a New Zealand sheep experiment published in the journal Science, none of the ewes on a normal diet had premature births, but half of the ewes that were put on a moderate weight-loss diet at the time of conception gave birth prematurely. (83) The researchers decided that a mother's diet before and around the time she conceives can profoundly influence the length of pregnancy, and they called this a stunning scientific breakthrough. This is what I mean about medical researchers knowing nothing about nutrition. It's obvious, but they didn't have a clue.

Sheep have been studied before, and they have shown all the same symptoms and problems that humans have. In one study, pregnant sheep were starved at the very end of their pregnancies, and most of them died. Other researchers have found that sheep giving birth to twins, triplets, or quadruplets are more likely to have toxemia than those giving birth to single lambs.

This is true for humans, too. A woman pregnant with twins has to eat for three, for herself and each of her babies, and a woman pregnant with triplets has to eat for four. It isn't easy to do this, but the more good nutrition a woman can provide for her developing babies, the healthier they will be. (72)

Q: One problem women face is that they may not be planning to get pregnant, or they may not know they're pregnant until several weeks have passed. Yet their diet at the time of conception is as important as their diet in the following nine months.

Dr. Brewer: That's exactly right. If you're a woman of child-bearing age and you're remotely interested in having children, the only sensible thing to do is improve your diet now. Pregnancy is a test of the body. This is why it's so hard on the poor. It's also hard on the fashionably thin. It's worse if you smoke, too, but the most important factor is nutrition. If you make bad food choices, you're more likely to have complications during pregnancy and give birth to a child who has serious health problems. But if you ignore the advice of most doctors and eat the foods that support the developing fetus, you'll have a problem-free pregnancy and a healthy child. And if you're already pregnant, it isn't too late to improve your baby's health. Even in the final months of pregnancy, improving the maternal diet has a beneficial effect on fetal growth. (30)