GROW HEALTHY BABIES
The Evidence-Based Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy and Reducing Your Child’s Risk of Asthma, Eczema, and Allergies

RESOURCES

This page contains resources mentioned in the book Grow Healthy Babies (available from Amazon & others). The authors have no affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any of the resources listed below.

Books on Fermentation

The Cultured Club by Dearbhla Reynolds

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz

From our book Grow Healthy Babies:

“A great way of increasing the number of beneficial bacteria in your gut is to consume fermented vegetables like pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi (the spicy Korean version of sauerkraut), and fermented drinks like kefir and kombucha. If you haven’t tried them yet, you should! Fermented vegetables are crunchy, tangy, salty, and savoury, which makes them a great condiment with almost every meal, while the drinks are slightly sweet, tart, and fizzy like lemonade. Our daughter loves sauerkraut and kombucha.

Humans have used fermentation for thousands of years to preserve food and add texture and flavour. Fermented foods are teeming with dozens of different species of beneficial microbes—about a billion bacteria per gram or millilitre, which means about 15 billion per tablespoon. Two or three tablespoons of fermented foods or drinks thus give you about the same probiotic dose as the highest-strength probiotic capsules available in your local health shop! However, unlike probiotic capsules, fermented foods also contain vitamins, minerals, enzymes, phytonutrients, and fibre.

We have started making kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, and kimchi at home because it’s so easy, and so much cheaper than buying them in the shop. There are plenty of helpful guides online and on YouTube, and I highly recommend the books The Cultured Club by Dearbhla Reynolds and The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz—considered by many to be the bible of fermented foods.”

Pregnancy Supplements

Always speak with your physician or other healthcare professional before starting any supplements. Your local health shop or nutritionist can help you find the right supplements for your needs.

From our book Grow Healthy Babies:

“You may wonder whether you should be taking any supplements to support your growing baby. In short, yes, but you shouldn’t see it as a replacement for a healthy, balanced diet. While healthy food is more work, it provides a much bigger variety and higher quality of nutrients and antioxidants than any pill, and it creates better lifelong habits and flavour preferences for your child. (…)

Yet, medical research has also zeroed in on a number of specific nutrients that play a role in preventing both atopic diseases and neurodevelopmental disorders. This is where supplements can play an extremely useful role.”

Supplement brands we use at home

  • Minami Nutrition Omega-3 Fish Oils
    We take MorDHA and MorEPA capsules; our daughter likes the strawberry-flavoured chewable MorDHA Mini capsules for kids. (If Minami is not available where you live, see the section “About choosing fish oil supplements”.)

  • Udo’s Choice Probiotics
    Available in the fridge section of select health stores; we use Super 8 Hi-Potency Probiotic and the Toddler’s & Children‘s Probiotic.

  • BioCare
    Michelle takes Nutrisorb® Liquid Methylfolate and our daughter likes the banana-flavoured Children's Complete Complex multivitamin mixed in with her breakfast muesli. We also buy the BioAcidophilus Forte probiotics if Udo’s Choice (above) aren’t available.

  • Metagenics
    Michelle has used the MethylCare® L-methylfolate supplement when BioCare (above) wasn’t available. Their probiotics also seem to be of good quality.

  • NOW Foods
    They are widely available in health stores and offer a wide range of good-quality supplements, including vitamins, minerals, high-strength probiotics, Omega-3 fish & krill oils, and L-methylfolate.

  • Viridian
    A high-quality, ethical brand of vitamins, minerals, and herbs, often from organic sources.

  • Better You DLUX
    Our go-to Vitamin D supplement - an oral spray with pleasant flavours, high-strength and easily absorbed.

About choosing fish oil supplements:

“If you decide to take fish oil supplements, it’s crucial to choose high-quality brands which are purified, independently tested for heavy metals, and from sustainable sources. The International Fish Oil Standards Program (IFOS) has data for all reputable brands on their website, and LabDoor provides fish oil rankings based on quality and value-for-money. For more information on fish oil, there’s a great in-depth buyers guide on health author Chris Kresser’s website.”

About choosing probiotics:

“If you choose to take probiotics, here’s how to select a good supplement:

  • You want as many viable organisms per capsule as possible. Most of the clinical trials mentioned in Grow Healthy Babies used doses between 10 billion to 100 billion viable organisms (CFU) per day. High-quality probiotics have 30–50 billion viable organisms per capsule. The cheaper, pharmacy chain- branded probiotics can contain as few as 10 million viable organisms—that’s 5,000 times less!

  • If you want to give probiotics to your baby or toddler, select a special infant probiotic which contains a different, age-appropriate mix.

  • Look for supplements that contain a mix of bacteria, but especially Lactobacillus rhamnosus or paracasei, and Bifidobacterium longum, lactis, or breve; these have been found to be most effective in the prevention of atopic diseases.

  • Ideally, buy probiotics that have been shipped and stored refrigerated, and store them in the fridge at home.”

Eco Products

About choosing cleaning products:

“When it comes to cleaning around the house, I try to keep it simple. Remember that your goal is not to wipe out all bacteria in your environment, and that bacterial diversity is important for your baby’s developing immune system.

For general-purpose cleaning (floors, wiping tables and countertops, etc.), I use a bit of castile soap—a simple, traditional soap made from vegetable oils—diluted in water. I’ve found Dr. Bronner’s Pure-Castile Liquid Soap to be very efficient and a great value. Per bottle, it is a bit more expensive than a regular all-purpose cleaner, but I need to use a lot less. I also buy Dr. Bronner’s Pure-Castile Soap Bar for hand washing. They are both widely available and score the highest safety rating from the Environmental Working Group. For other cleaning products like dishwashing liquid, dishwasher tabs, laundry detergent, and toilet cleaners, I usually buy Ecover ZERO (that’s their fragrance-free line, available in Europe and the United States) or Sonett (only available in Europe so far).”

Products we use at home:

About choosing cosmetics:

“As for cosmetics, I like to use brands which only use natural and certified organic ingredients, with pure essential oils as fragrances. However, essential oils can cause skin irritations and allergic reactions in some people, so you need to find out what works for you.”

Cosmetics brands we use at home:

About choosing baby care products:

“So what do we use to keep our daughter clean? Barely anything! (..) She gets bathed about once a week, and we only ever wash her with warm water, without soap or shampoo. Which is just as well, because like many kids, she found drinking bathwater irresistible for a while. (..) After a bath, we sometimes moisturised her skin with extra-virgin (unrefined) coconut oil. We also used it as a diaper balm. A big $10 tub of the good organic variety lasted us for months.

As for diapers and wipes, we used brands like Naty (available worldwide), which only use fragrance-free, chlorine-free (and thus dioxin-free), and natural compostable materials like wood pulp and corn starch. They work great, too. With this simple combination—eco nappies, wipes, and coconut oil—our daughter didn’t experience a single diaper rash.”

Baby care brands we used at home:

Eco Stores

From our book Grow Healthy Babies:

“Organic stores usually apply higher standards to the products they carry, so you are less likely to encounter greenwashed items. Whole Foods Market, for example, has comprehensive standards for cleaning products and cosmetics, both of which exclude hundreds of chemicals that are otherwise found in pseudo-green products. Cleaning products in Whole Foods’ “Eco-Label Green Tier” (their highest rating) and cosmetics labelled with their “Premium Body Care Standard” are free from synthetic fragrances, formaldehyde, parabens, methylisothiazolinone, and many, many more. (..) Such chains exist in almost every country now, but if you don’t live near such a store, try googling for “organic online stores”—these really do exist everywhere.”

Below, you can find a partial list of organic supermarket chains and eco stores by region. If your country and favourite chain are missing, please let us know at hello@growhealthybabies.com!

 

Northern Europe

Denmark

Norway

Sweden

Southern Europe

Italy

Portugal

Spain

 

Concorde Breastfeeding Method

From our book Grow Healthy Babies:

“By now, it had been a month since our daughter’s birth, and we were still supplementing her breastfeeding with pumped breast milk in bottles. The lactation consultant thought there was nothing else we could do—just wait for her to get bigger, which would hopefully make latching easier.

We decided to look for help elsewhere. I asked my doula, Dana, for the best person she knew, and she recommended another lactation consultant, Myrte van Lonkhuijsen. You could hardly find somebody more experienced: Myrte had been the chairwoman of the Dutch Association of Lactation Consultants for five years. I reached out to her. The same afternoon, Myrte came cycling to our house on her old Dutch bike, a big professional baby weighing scale strapped onto the rear carrier. She radiated calm, confidence, and kindness, combined with an absolute determination to fix this problem. I loved her immediately! And what happened next felt like pure magic. (..)

Myrte’s method made it possible for our daughter to get the whole nipple into her mouth. It worked like a miracle. Barely fifteen minutes after Myrte had stepped into our door, our daughter was happily and painlessly latched on to my boob and drinking away. It was the beginning of her lasting love affair with boobie, and we stopped needing to pump breast milk that same afternoon. Myrte has since helped a few of my friends solve their breastfeeding problems, sometimes even via Skype.”

Below is Myrte van Lonkhuijsen’s “Concorde Manual”, also available as a PDF via her website.