Saturated Fat: Nutrition for Starting a Family

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September 3, 2024

Sometimes a young couple asks for specific advice about nutritional requirements for fertility and pregnancy.

Their story often starts with how many years they have tried, how many miscarriages they’ve had, how many hormone treatments and in vitro fertilizations had failed.

After a brief conversation, the prospective mother tells me she is following a low fat, high carbohydrate diet, and she eats very little meat.

By changing their dietary program to fit the guidelines of the Weston A. Price Foundation, every one of these couples has successfully conceived and delivered a healthy baby - something that they thought might be impossible given what they’d gone through.

I am always amazed and awed at how well it works. Conception occurs in six months or less, and the baby is carried to term.

Saturated fat is a necessary nutrient for fertility and pregnancy. Without it, a successful pregnancy is not possible.

There is a wide variety, including butter, lard, beef tallow, chicken or duck fat, fatty fish such as salmon and mackerel. (Crab has an additional bonus for fertility - the yellow “crab butter” in the cavity just below the head).

Saturated fats are needed for developing the fetal nervous system and brain that will see them through their school years with fewer learning disabilities and behavioral issues.

Saturated fat contains the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K. Some nutrition experts claim that these vitamins are also available in vegetables. However, vegetable sources only have the precursors to these vitamins, so your body must conjugate them to make the actual vitamin. The human body is only capable of converting a small fraction of the precursor, much less than what is required for optimal health.

Pastured animals, on the other hand, easily convert them to vitamins, and they store the fully formed vitamins in their fat. That is why it is more efficient and effective to obtain fat soluble vitamins directly from the fat of the animals that make it.

Now come the protests: “Saturated fat will make me fat!” The fact is, carbohydrates are what make you fat. If you reduce your intake of carbs and increase saturated fats, you will shed excess pounds. Try it.

An important consideration is the source of all this fat. It must come from healthy animals that are fed on pasture. 100% grass-fed beef, pastured and forested pork, pastured chickens and lamb. If it is pastured, it has the right balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids (no need to supplement with fish oil for omega-3). If it is pastured, it contains conjugated linoleic acid, which has numerous health benefits other than maintaining a healthy pregnancy. It contains fat-soluble vitamins in quantities your body can’t produce alone. It contains other factors involved in developing healthy bones and immune system. It also provides raw materials for making hormones that govern biochemical activity of every system of the body.

For a list of other foods that are essential for fertility and pregnancy, dig into the Weston A. Price foundation's recommended diet for pregnant and nursing mothers. They have an article full of amazing information.

May you be deeply nourished!

Susan

Events of The Month

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Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

Saturated Fat: Nutrition for Starting a Family

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