Ep 165. A Holistic Approach to Hypertension Prevention in Pregnancy

Join Kelly and Tiffany to discuss a proactive approach to preventing hypertension in pregnancy. They explore the importance of understanding blood pressure, the impact of diet, physical movement, supplements, and herbal support on blood pressure stability. The ladies also share touching listener reviews and provide additional resources for expecting and preconception individuals.

00:00 Introduction

01:56 Listener Review: Holly ROMAC

04:49 Recommendations for Hypertension Prevention

17:41 Supplement and Herbal Support

20:20 Liver Support

28:33 Conclusion and Additional Resources

Links to all the extra good stuff:

Fullscript Protocol: HERE
Silverettes: HERE
Hypertension Info: HERE
Childbirth Education Wait List: HERE
Join our email community: HERE
Submit your answer-on-the-show questions: HERE

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to At Home with Kelly and Tiffany, where naturally minded women gather together as we pursue simplicity and confidence in health alternatives, so we can show up better in our busy lives and feel more at home in our bodies. Join your favorite home birth midwife duo for conversation, candor, and community. You're at home with Kelly and Tiffany I'm, Tiffany I'm Kelly. And today we get to talk about preventing hypertension in pregnancy. Yes. So if you don't know what hypertension is, if you don't know why it's important, if you don't understand risks or how to again, prevent it. We are going to jump into all of those details, talking about just a proactive way to support your body. Of course. We cannot guarantee, right. That you will be able to prevent this, but we've witnessed it just over and over the research. Is there pointing women towards how to support this? And most care providers are not talking about this proactive approach, which is why we want to talk about it. Most of the women I've seen that we've supported. When we're talking about blood pressure. Most of them don't even know like what exactly it is, or we'll say the numbers and they'll just be like, is that good? We were like kind of joking. We're like, Hey, like you're fine. Right? And so we're going to get a little bit into that, just so that you understand when you are getting your blood pressure taken, what is actually. What it actually is and why. Like what it means when that number is high and the stress that it's putting on your body. But before we get into that, we have, you guys have been so generous in your reviews. But we wanted to read another one because we have this little treasure trove of reviews to share with y'all. Yeah. And at some point they, they jump off of the. The S they jump off of whatever gets auto populated by itself. And so. I'm like, we got to read these before. They move or expire or whatever. I don't know. This is from Holly ROMAC and the title of this five star review is called, makes my heart happy. Huh. Oh, that's great. I'm happy. We can be a part of that. This is what Holly says. I'm in the preconception phase. I hold on. I just love that. Yeah. It's like so intentional and thoughtful. I'm here for it. Okay. And she identifies with being like, I'm about to get pregnant. That's great. I'm in a phase right before I get pregnant. And she says, and you could say I'm type a. Okay, this is drinking. Just kidding. So I was meticulously planning to the point that I was stressing myself out. This podcast has been such a breath of fresh air for me, because I am still actively getting information to fuel my body and my mind to the best that I can, but I get to listen to lighthearted, hilarious conversations between best friends. I don't feel overwhelmed by the information, but happily informed and I feel great about the ways and getting my body ready for pregnancy. I highly recommend this podcast to any woman regardless of their pregnancy status or period of life. Thanks for all you guys do. Red heart emoji. Oh, my gosh. That means, that means so much that if this information comes across, In this. Really dynamic combo of light and listener. But meaningful and actionable. Yeah. And that was like our whole hope when we started this podcast six years ago, five years ago. We wanted it to be like, you were just, you know, sitting down with girlfriends. Talking about like knowledgeable girlfriends. We were just talking about some of the things that actually matter to women and how to share the information that we know and that we have researched and pulled together in a way that makes it seem like. We're still keeping that piece of being like, oh, we're just chatting, but we're also educating and helping women live their best little lady lives. I can't believe we have done that. I can't like, I just still can't believe we get to provide that. Yeah. We we are living the living the podcast dream over here. So thank you, Holly, if you are listening to this episode, which maybe you are, because you're, you know, thinking about getting pregnant, imagining you just being as proactive and type as possible. If you cure us reading this review on this episode, Shoot us a message. Email Instagram, DM. Those are probably the two places that you could do that. Let us know and we will buy you a drink. Maybe a some kind of nourishing. Uh, I don't know, prepregnancy drink a libation of some kind and it'd be great. Okay. So before we talk about hypertension, I wanted to give a little shout out to a postpartum staple. So we're talking about obviously preventing something in pregnancy. If you are listening, potentially you are pregnant already or wanting to get pregnant, or maybe thinking about it for the next time. This is something that having in your back pocket, offering to other women. Who, you know, you're going to their baby shower or putting it on your own registry. But we, I recently was chatting with a client about something that she used in her postpartum that I feel very similarly about just given my experience with them in my postpartum years ago. But they're called silver assets. Don't know if you've heard of them yet. If you have not, Tiffany have seen these little silver. Cups. It's literally tiny silver cups that sort of look like nipple tassels when they are on you. But they're basically for nipple protection and healing while you are breastfeeding, especially kind of in those early days where you're just like, oh, everything's tender and shifting potentially there's some pain or maybe there's been cracking on your nipples and you're trying to continue to You know, you're trying to continue to breastfeed and save that part of your relationship, but also trying to make your help your nipples heal, trying to figure out all of the things. This is like the one-stop shop. You don't need anything else besides these little cups. But this mom said these saved my entire breastfeeding relationship and helped me bond better to my baby because I wasn't wincing or dreading nursing anymore. These were an absolute miracle worker. Of course, working on a deeper latch was important, but these helped heal my nipples so quickly while doing that literally a complete game. Changer. I'm giving these to every new mom. I know. So I have given these two moms at baby showers, not on their registry, but I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm just doing this for you because I love you and care for you. And there's always like, oh, ha like kind of a joke about it. Like maybe potentially some people are somewhat awkward about it. And then I get a text afterwards and they're like, Thank you so much. I don't know anyone who has, who they have not worked for. Yeah. I don't. And we even have a pair that we lend out from our practice because they are, it's such an important part of keeping nipple, skin healthy and supple, or getting it back to that place that we just recommend all of our clients to have them on hand. And if they don't, then we have a pair that they can borrow while they go get their own pair. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So I just wanted to share, because I, that was on my brain just had a conversation about it and was like, I don't know if we've actually. We talked about those yet. And I just find them to be, again like this mom said like game changers. Okay. And so we will link those in our show notes. If you want to take advantage of them, you can find them on Amazon. It's so easy. You can prime them. To yourself, to your, to your lady, friends. Okay, so let's let's get started. We can talk about hypertension. Hypertension meaning high blood pressure. So if we don't know what blood pressure is though, we don't really even care or know what hypertension is. Right. So blood pressure itself, that's the measurement of the, this is going to sound very obvious, but then when you start seeing it, you're like, oh, okay. That makes sense. The measurement of the pressure of the blood. Right. And that's the pressure that's pushing against the blood vessel walls. So when you have hypertension, when you, when that blood pressure, that pressure that's building up is high. It means that that pressure against the blood vessel walls is above that normal range. There's a ton of just pressure pushing outwards at that point, which can absolutely cause issues. So in pregnancy that can mean a few different things. Then it could, in other seasons of life, it is never a positive thing to have high blood pressure just generally, but in pregnancy, your heart has to work a lot harder. It has to pump a ton more blood throughout your body. Your blood volume is expanding a bunch 50% while you're pregnant, right. That in and of itself is going to put extra stress on your body. But when that pressure just kind of explodes like that, it's going to affect a lot of different pieces of what's. What's going on in your body, it can affect the, how the placenta is developing, how that's functioning. It can impact the health of your baby, your pregnancy risk status. So it should be checked. Your blood pressure should be checked. It should be managed. Because it can lead to very significant issues for you and your baby. And potentially it can be incredibly serious if not you know, Mitigated and taken care of. So. That's just sort of like our starting point of understanding. Why that even actually matters at this point. Certainly it can be a sign of other things causing issue and it can also then snowball into other issues as well. But if we're able to kind of focus on this piece that can take your risk status down quite a bit for all of these other potential problems, I'll never forget. The first client we had who came to us, it was like her third pregnancy or something. No, I think it was her fourth. I think it was her fourth pregnancy fired. Third or fourth pregnancy anyway. Yep. I think it was her third pregnancy. She had two pregnancies that we did not work with her. And she said in both pregnancies at exactly 37 weeks, her blood pressure got out of control. And so we were like, Ooh, this is so fascinating. Oh, what's happening there? Physiologically, what can we do to support that? And so we put a prophylactic. Protocol together for her. And so for the very first time in pregnancy, she did not have hypertension at 37 weeks. And I mean, we didn't know really that we were going to be able to impact anything. But I think that for me, Was a huge game changer in how we can use herbal medicine and just supporting the system overall, when you understand what is happening naturally and what your body's trying to do and how to support that. We were able to avoid an entire prenatal complication for this client. So. Yeah, it's been, it's been cool. It's this? So from that point, I remember being like, oh, there's, there's something to this. And then. You know, kind of, expanding from there, our awareness and our you know, education on a bunch of different aspects of how can we impact this in a way that is. Long lasting in a way that is meaningful. In a way that right. Women who have had these experiences. Ideally like if we can change that entire risk status or support the system in a particular way that allows them to have the home birth that they're desiring how they low-risk pregnancy not to have to be induced, not need certain medication, things like that, that, that changes. So much of the trajectory of somebody's whole obstetrical experience and history. So it really does matter both personally, but then professionally, we get the satisfaction of like, oh, Wow. We get to be a part of something that really is impactful on people's lives. Yeah. It's so cool. Okay. So the recommendations to start with is just food. And we focus on blood sugar balancing and a couple of dietary recommendations that surround that. So what's important to understand about insulin and blood sugar balance with blood pressure is that insulin impacts Vasso dilation. So the way that your vascular structures, your veins. Basically like get larger or smaller. And when you have a visa dilation there, you're creating just a bigger space and less pressure for your blood to go through. And when you have a smaller vein, obviously that creates less area inside of your body and creates more pressure, more tension, more everything in side, your whole body, because circulation runs through your entire body. And insulin impacts that. So you want to focus on blood sugar balancing techniques. That's going to be key to foundationally supporting your blood pressure indirectly, and then focusing on a diet full of whole anti-inflammatory low-glycemic foods being really careful about pairing your fats and proteins together, avoiding glucose spikes and crashes, because that is going to impact blood sugar or blood pressure instability as well. And you just want to make. Just wise dietary choices. This is an example of where, what you eat can just foundationally affect. So very much you want a ton of protein in pregnancy in general, but if you are having. Factors for hypertension. You want at least a hundred grams of protein in order to support all of those blood pressure structures and your blood sugar. And salty foods. Are different than salt team, your food. So choosing pink, Himalayan, salt, Celtic, salt, sea salt, all of those, you can dose liberally, real salt. You can put onto your food. You want to avoid synthetic salty or sodium heavy foods? Most of that would be like pre-packaged food essentially. And then you want a lot of potassium, magnesium getting lots of fiber in your diet, staying well hydrated, adding in those minerals, even adding Salta to your monitor or adding trace minerals, get potassium and magnesium. In with those two and just allow your system to be balanced with some of those dietary foundations. Yeah. What I think is interesting about that too, is this like salting your food versus salty food. If you are in kind of medicalized care, most women are hearing. Decrease your salt intake. And that is completely outdated information and unhelpful. Recommendation for you, your body needs the salt. It does not need the type of salt that we were just like that pre-packaged kind of extra salty foods. But what it needs is those minerals that come from salt. So obviously you get to decide what you're going to do with that information. But if you have been given that recommendation in the past, Research that, and kind of go down that. Bit of rabbit hole to see what your body actually. Needs. But looking at that research, it's really outdated and even eight cog, which like is the governing body of like these obstetricians who are giving this advice recommends against it. So it kind of goes to show you. How slow to the uptake. Some of these, you know, research, some of the research and some of the recommendations are to actual clinical practice. So. Little a tidbit there for you. Okay. So, this is going to sound. Somewhat, like all of these recommendations just are good in general life. Right. And so some of them sound so foundational, but that's the, that's the key, right? Like the food idea key. Now we'll talk a little bit about physical movement as well. Moving your body intentionally. These are good things to be doing all throughout your life, but in pregnancy, especially at least 20 minutes a day, it's been shown to have a positive impact on your blood pressure. And if you're adding that to like, more walks throughout the day or the week if you're adding strength training, especially three times a week or so. All of those things have been shown to help increase or I guess, decrease your risks for increased blood pressure. And so there's really good research about how helpful it is to actually move your body to actually eat. Food. That is good for you. Right? Of course there is. But intentional kind of stretching, yoga type stuff is also correlated with lower blood pressure as well. I do wonder if part of that is that's just a calming experience as well, right? But be mindful of your movement throughout the day, whether it is your monitoring, right. Via like your Fitbit type thing and like getting your steps in or just. Finding places of like, oh, I'm actually sitting at my desk a lot today. I'm going to just like, take a lap around. Right. Or I've been sitting and reading to my toddler for the last couple hours. I really should like, maybe we can just go for a quick walk or something like that, but weaving more kind of physical movement into your everyday activities will absolutely pay off for this. Yeah. And like, I think that just goes for all of us. General, but we see a difference between women who are more physically fit in this particular area, like willing to do any small amount of regular exercise versus. Being completely sedentary. Yup. The other thing. That we want to bring up and we're preventing hypertension is an appropriate use of supplements and herbs and. All of these supplements that I am about to suggest to you just help to support the blood pressure system and structures, but it would be okay for all women to have these items in their regular rotation in pregnancy. And that starts with the vitamin B six, but you are welcome to take a B complex as well. Calcium. Magnesium century. So the type of magnesium. Here is the citrate version. Probably our favorite form of that is the nature calm powder. Just more, more correlation with blood pressure stability, then another type of magnesium glycinate. You guys hear us recommending that all the time. Methylene did fully it's very important. Vitamin C vitamin D vitamin E all really helpful to vascular structures inside of the body. And then our favorite supplement for hypertension support in pregnancy is Hawthorne. And that can be taken as a tincture that can be taken as a tea that can be taken as capsules. Our recommendation is usually always to enjoy it in tincture form because you can get the most standardized dosing and. It's relatively inexpensive, very easy to dose yourself and. That is an excellent recommendation for just keeping blood pressure stable. Yeah. That's one of those that like, we have always known is a good one. One that we didn't have on hand at a birth. And I remember looking back and being like, oh, Wish wish that we had that. And one that, I mean, even outside of pregnancy, Can be used. My husband uses it sometimes when he has issues with his own blood pressure. And so that's a really solid one. These supplements are all a part of a Fullscript protocol also. And so we have a managing hypertension protocol in there. If you're like, oh, let me look at what type you recommend or the dosing and that kind of thing. And we also go very in-depth on this issue, this like supplement and herb issue in our childbirth. Birth education class as well. For women taking that, not necessarily as medical advice, but looking more into what is the exact protocol that we recommend for herbal support and how to. Weave that into kind of everyday life. Okay. Next up is liver support. The liver has to work so hard in pregnancy, right? There's so many pieces of our bodies that have to just simply work harder. There's just a lot more. From the pregnancy is normal and natural and all that good stuff. There's just a lot more stress on our bodies at that point. And so support for your liver is just monumentally key in pregnancy. To avoid this issue. Part of that is the food and the movement, things that we've been talking about. But we want to focus on gentle liver support. A lot of women don't realize that they can do. Liver support during pregnancy. I think there's been a lot of discussion on like liver detox. We're not going crazy on this, but we're just gently supporting it in so many different aspects of daily life that absolutely we want to help this liver. Do, you know, kind of firing on all cylinders and do what it needs to do. So we love for this Nora tea. You can add the. Are a part that red raspberry leaf after 16 weeks, that's a great one to be drinking every day. You can also add into that. There's not really like a good, I guess, NORAD. I suppose you can add dandy lion also dandelion. Herbal infusions are stellar for liver support. In general, you can drink that daily as well. Adding lemon to your water, doing things very simple, like supportive things like dry brushing. We have a whole episode. On that Epsom salt baths that you can take. And then I think one of the pieces that often gets overlooked, but the idea of kind of decreasing this toxic burden or this toxic load that we have on our bodies and the work that the liver actually has to do. Would be decreasing some of the things that will disrupt it. A lot of those endocrine disruptors looking into what kind of products am I using on my body? What kind of. Level of food. Am I eating, you know, pesticides, antibiotics, things like that. The liver really is impacted on how it works. How it works things out. And so, you know, things to consider weaving into your everyday life that hopefully don't feel overwhelming by any means, but at least something to kind of put in your. In your mind as you move forward. And let's talk about testing a little bit, because it's easy to just slap all this stuff on and just have an arsenal of things that you're like. I don't know. Allowing to be in the toolbox, but testing can be a really important part of just continuing to monitor your health. It's also something that even if you're not pregnant yet could be some good. Lab work to have onboard before you even get pregnant and give yourself even more of a leg up on getting metabolically healthy. But doing a metabolic panel, a complete metabolic panel at some point in the beginning of your pregnancy and then checking on it, ideally in every single trimester, we'll help you to monitor liver and kidney function, which you've heard Kelly, you know, just explain how it's so closely tied. To hypertension. And then also understanding and knowing your MTHFR genetic mutation status. Can be really important because MTHFR gene mutations are linked with some of these. Issues that potentially develop from poor liver health and arterial health and blood pressure health. And so when we see those. Pings start to happen and connect some of these different pieces. We consider them as risk factors. And so that might be an important thing to know about your own personal risk factors. And homocysteine levels kind of go along with that. So people who have the MTHFR genetic mutation can have a more difficult time. Methylating their own. Vitamins essentially. And homocysteine is something that tries to help you do that, but essentially like builds up in your body as it's trying to help you get all of these non methylated. Vitamins out of your body. And so it's a marker for how hard your body is trying to work. On that toxic load and can give, and can point more information towards, is that because you have this gene mutation, that one in three women have, or is there another reason that you're having a hard time processing homocysteine from your body? And then we'll put some more information about some of those pieces specifically in the show notes, because those of you who are thinking right now about your own risk factors, you are going to want to find out more information about this, but we just can't get all into it here today. Yeah, for sure. And so you'll see about, you know, testing and kind of rabbit hole stuff there for you. And I feel like we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the fact that if you are in medical medical model of care and also many midwives are also just continuing on with this because there is research there to provide some support. But it would be a baby aspirin. So that's a very common recommendation for women with a history of high blood pressure or dealing with high blood pressure, especially. Towards the beginning of pregnancy. So that's the idea of taking a baby aspirin every single day. It's the idea, right? Is that it's going to help with the pressure and the blood is kind of putting on the veins that we spoke about. It's going to help thin those types of things. You get to decide. Yes, there is research pointing towards the validity of that. But again, at the end of the day, you get to decide if that is something that feels appropriate for you. If the risk. Benefit analysis feels right for you. If that feels like the trajectory you want to go down and you can utilize a lot of these recommendations also alongside that. Or if there is another way that you want to go about approaching this. So not telling you what to do by any means, but letting you know, if you have a history of this. And haven't been pregnant yet and come into pregnancy, this most likely will be. Something that is discussed as well as if you've had a history at any point of this. Yeah. And I think the, the, like someone might be like, well, if there's evidence to support that, it's helpful. Why wouldn't you. Well, because it's a blood thinner because it's, you know, it's over the counter pharmaceutical and because it doesn't address the root cause. Yeah. There's a three, like big thing, something to consider. Yeah. If you're wondering, like, why would someone not take advantage of that? Recommendation. Yeah, for sure. So how cool is it that you get an opportunity to take in all this information and just like take a grip. On an aspect of your health and potentially rewrite an entire experience. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty cool to be able to look at this and be like, okay, well this feels scary. Or some women are like, oh, I want to like jump into having a home birth, or I really desire that. But this thing was my blood pressure. Okay. Well that could potentially change or shift and. Not only just where you have your baby, but the entire experience of you owning. Your health and your outcomes. Pretty cool. Yeah. And I guess it's worth saying that like primary hypertension going into pregnancy hyper attentive already is going to make is going to give you a higher risk. In fact, like it's contraindicated for home birth and probably most out of hospital birth. So if you deal with hypertension in your regular life and you're not pregnant yet, you do have some potential resources. I mean, beyond the information we're providing here, but I do want to encourage you to that, like getting in touch with a functional medicine doctor or a naturopath or something you absolutely could. Address your primary hypertension before you get pregnant. Yeah, that's important to like wrap your head around too, especially the sweetness of you know, maybe we kind of joke about the idea of preconception time and like type a, whatever. No, no, no. It's an opportunity for you to. Really dial down some of these health pieces and your blood pressure being an issue already can be a sign of other types of metabolic things going on that you absolutely can. Get out of the kind of the cycle of, for sure. So hopefully that feels like an encouragement to you. Hopefully you're kind of feeling inspired, empowered, potentially a bit more confident in moving forward. You're going to find it in the show notes, a bit more information. I'll link those silver ads that full script hypertension recommendations, some stuff on the MTHFR kind of connection, those testing options. As well as a link to our wait list for our childbirth education class. We go into this information and even more, just in a lot more detail and kind of nuance. And like I was mentioning lots more kind of protocol recommendation styles on this. And a million other topics it's been cool to put together. And so we are excited to share with you when it is ready to officially launch out into the world soon. Yeah. I mean, which is going to be happening. I mean, we're going to be completing it with our beta class in the next couple of weeks.