Lana Asprey - The Better Baby Book: How to Have a Healthier, Smarter, Happier Baby

To our children, Anna and Alan, and their children, and so on

Copyright 2013 by Better Baby, LLC. All rights reserved

Cover Design: Wendy Mount
Cover Photograph: nicolas hansen/Getty Images

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN 978-1-118-13713-0 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-22519-6 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-23624-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26342-6 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

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Acknowledgments

We wrote this book because, after careful reflection, it seemed like the single best thing we could do to help the world be better. If parents learn what they can do to give their children better genes, their children will be stronger, smarter, and healthierand then they will pass those genes on to their children. What an awesome way for a book to live on even as the printed version of these pages crumble to dust. We are grateful that we had the knowledge, education, and resources to create this program for our children. But we did not do it alone.

Gary Taubes, the author of the New York Times best seller Good Calories, Bad Calories , was kind enough to read our proposal and then introduce us to his agent, Kristine Dahl at ICM, who agreed to become our literary agent. Were it not for Gary's generosity and Kris's guidance and hard work representing us in finding a publisher, this book wouldn't have happened. Our thanks to you both, and to Laura Neely of ICM as well.

Our thanks to Andrew Clark, our researcher, who spent countless hours finding the references that we used to educate ourselves before we knew this was going to become a book. There were more than 1,300 references, to be more accurate, and Andrew formatted and posted them on our website so they will be available for everyone who has the time and desire to cull through them. His tireless attention to writing and editing was critical. This book wouldn't exist without Andrew's diligence and attention to every detail.

Ronnie Falcao, LM, MS, CPM, our homebirth midwife, shared her amazing knowledge about how birth affects baby health and wellness, and she provided gentle but insistent encouragement to write this book after she saw how transformative our program was when we used it ourselves. We are grateful that Ronnie runs gentlebirth.org, a wonderful site for parents looking to change birth into the emotional and spiritual experience it is. Barbara Findeisen, one of the world's foremost experts on pre-and perinatal psychology, also helped to shape our understanding of birth and how important it is for healthy children. Barbara can be found at starfound.org. Jan Rydfors, MD, our ob-gyn at Stanford, was amazingly open and supportive of our nontraditional approach, saying, Whatever you're doing, keep it up. It's working!

Our thanks to Dr. Philip Lee Miller, MD, of Los Gatos Longevity Institute ( antiaging.com ), who used bioidentical hormones and nutrition to help both of us balance our hormones for maximum health and fertility. Dr. Miller generously provided knowledge and support far beyond expectations, and it made a difference to us personally, and to the book and hopefully the parents who read it.

For nearly twenty years, world-class health and medical researchers and practitioners have been presenting their findings to the public at Silicon Valley Health Institute ( svhi.com ) meetings in Palo Alto. Dave is grateful to be president of SVHI and believes that this book would not have been possible without the knowledge he gained from more than a decade of learning with experts. In particular, Steve Fowkes, the biochemist adviser to SVHI, author of several health books, and head of CERI.com , played a pivotal role in the evolution of this book by sharing an almost supernatural understanding of the inner workings of human biochemistry.

Our editor at John Wiley & Sons, Thomas Miller, and assistant editor Jorge Amaral were hugely helpful in bringing the book to fruition and keeping our writing concise and on target. Beth Rashbaum, an independent editor, helped to set the tone of the book early in our process of writing.

The members of the Better Baby teamAndrew, Alexis, and Aaronhave all helped to pull this knowledge together, and we appreciate the passion they put into their work every day.

Dave wishes to thank Lana for so closely following this program while she was pregnant. The results of that effort play with him in our yard every day! Lana wishes to thank Dave for cooking all of those low-toxin, high-healthy-fat Better Baby meals, and most especially for making so much amazingly good, fertility-enhancing, homemade ice cream!

But most of all, we'd like to thank our parents, who did their best to pass great genes on to us. We in turn are doing our best to improve those genes and pass them down to our own children, and we sincerely hope they do the same with their children.

PART ONE

The Better Baby Plan

You Are a Cocreator: The Better Baby Plan

There's still much we don't understand about how the wonderful, amazingly complex little beings called babies develop and grow, even though we've been trying to figure it out from time immemorial. As part of this effort, researchers were trying to understand the role that genes play, and in the 1990s they set out to sequence the human genome. Their work led to today's understanding that our genes don't have the final word on who we are or what our children will be. Instead, our children's biological prospects are the result of a delicate interplay of environment and parental genes. This intricate dance determines which genes will be turned on, or expressed, then passed on to the next generation, at which stage the interplay of heredity and environment again affects which genes will be turned on.