Due to my own health issues, these past 11 years have had me researching and investigating what the human body requires to repair, rebuild, and really truly thrive. In my postpartum time with my second child, I became a metabolic disaster running on stress hormones at the expense of my vital energy and body. 

Living life in perpetual survival mode is a recipe for accelerated ageing and deterioration. 

But it’s because of this real life experience and navigating my way through it, I can speak from a very real and honest place about it. I got myself out of the malnourished loop that I was stuck in. It’s also why I’m so keen to shift this and determined for it not to be normalized. 

The thing is, so many of us don’t even realize how key food is to our health. And when it comes to building and birthing children, so many of us come at it blind, and not understanding that our food choices during pregnancy are programming children, for better or worse. 

Connecting the dots between soil health, mineral depletion, malnourished plants, animals, and humans has been, pun intended, hard to digest. 

Harmful food ideologies and propaganda are pushed from every angle, guilting us into believing that we are killing our planet by consuming the very things we have evolved on. Our newborn children are taking a hard hit because of this narrative, and the further we disconnect from our food and the land, the sicker we get. 

Having a family member home to hold down the kitchen is one of the biggest losses of these past generations in my opinion. 

But for as dark as it all seems, the spotlight is starting to focus more on this topic, and thankfully “our genes are not written in stone. They are exquisitely sensitive to how we treat them.”

My 8 module program “Traditional Foods and Herbal Medicine” aims to arm birth workers and mothers with the knowledge and skills required to blossom with true health and vitality and support the next generation as a result.

Quotes by Catherine Shanahan, MD