Low Carb Diets and Childbirth

In the thread about The Origins Diet, this comment from Paul Abrinko appears:

I don't have any references on low carbing and pregnancy, but my wife ate low carb for both of her pregnancies. She gained only 25 lbs, blood pressure was fantastic, passed her glucose tolerance tests with flying colors, and gave birth to two beautiful baby boys who came in just under 7lbs. Labor for both was very fast, with 20 min. of pushing for the first and 5 min. for the second, which probably has to do with the babies' nice, normal size. So many women are giving birth to 9lb, 10lb and above babies, which can lead to many complications. Both of our kids are healthy; the second is still breast feeding, but the first eats low carb and is in the 95th percentile for height and 60th percentile for weight:)

Before I comment on this, I must once again state: I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on television. This is not medical advice.

That said, Paul's comment rang a bell for me. One of the first books on paleo diets to hit the market was NeanderThin by Ray Audette, sadly now out of print. NeanderThin impressed me then, and still impresses me today. Audette claims to have cured himself of diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis by eating a paleolithic diet, and his advice distills down neatly to this: If you couldn't obtain it naked, using a sharp stick and a rock, and eat it raw, it's not food. Not that he insists you eat everything raw, only that you not eat anything you couldn't eat raw. Meat is edible raw; fine restaurants serve sashimi, steak tartare, and carpaccio every day. Eggs are edible raw, as anyone who has had traditional eggnog or seen the movie Rocky knows. And of course vegetables, fruits and nuts are edible raw. Even dairy is, though Audette bans it on the grounds that you couldn't gather it with a sharp stick and a rock. Grains, legumes, and potatoes are outright toxic if eaten raw.

One of the most fascinating hypotheses Audette forwards in the book is this: He says that if you look at the original ancient Hebrew, the well-known and much-quoted verse in the book of Genesis that is usually rendered "Thou shalt not eat the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" can just as reasonably be translated "Thou shalt not eat the Fruit of the Technology which makes Edible the Inedible." That technology would be cooking.

It makes all sorts of sense that the words for "technology" and "knowledge" would be the same, especially going back to a time when "technology" mostly consisted of better ways to chip rock into spearheads. It also makes sense that the words for "good" and "edible" and "evil" and "inedible" would be the same, again, keeping in mind that this was a time when "How shall we eat today?" and "Can we eat that?" would have been far and away the most pressing questions of life.

This casts the story of the expulsion from the garden in the light of the end of hunting and gathering and the beginning of agriculture, when mankind decided that the food that God/Nature had provided wasn't enough, and took the decision of what was food and what should grow where into its own hands.

Look further along in Genesis, to the story of Cain and Abel: Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. God accepted Abel's sacrifice of meat, but rejected Cain's sacrifice of grain. That's an interesting detail to include in the story, don't you think?

But where does childbirth come into this? When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he laid a curse on them. Adam's curse was "In the sweat of your brow shall you earn your daily bread." This can be seen as "My Garden's not good enough for you? Work, sucker." We know that hunter-gatherers spend roughly 10-15 hours per week obtaining the necessities of life; the advent of agriculture meant the advent of the work week.

Eve's curse was that her pain in childbirth would be greatly multiplied. We know that one of the consequences of the invention of agriculture was a deterioration in skeletal status, with a drop in height, and -- and this is important -- a reduction in the size of the pelvis and the depth of the pelvic inlet. High carbohydrate diets, and especially maternal diabetes, are also associated with large babies. Combine big babies with little pelvises, and we're definitely talking pain in childbearing being greatly multiplied.

Looking at one of the great grain-free hunter (and not much in the way of gatherer) cultures that persisted into modern time, the Eskimos were reported by polar explorers to give birth with great ease. In his landmark book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston Price reported "Dr. Romig, the superintendent of the government hospital for Eskimos and Indians at Anchorage, Alaska...stated that in his thirty-six years among the Eskimos, he had never been able to arrive in time to see a normal birth by a primitive Eskimo woman." Indeed, one Eskimo woman reported giving birth while her husband slept, without waking him, and waiting till morning to introduce him to his new child. That's some easy childbirth.

Obviously, shifting to a low carb or paleo diet in adulthood cannot change the size of your pelvic outlet. It can, however, reduce your risk of an oversized baby, not to mention of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure. That's got to make the whole thing easier right there.

None of this is to say that the Genesis story cannot also be read as a story about the striking fact that man is the only animal capable of making a moral judgment and acting immorally anyway; it certainly can. But I though the whole idea was interesting, and in the light of Paul's comment, it seemed timely.