Conceiving Healthy Babies: An Herbal Guide to Support Preconception, Pregnancy, and Lactation

Ethnobotanist Combs, in this memoir-cum-herbal guide, chronicles her experiences with pregnancy and breastfeeding, before offering an abundance of suggestions to other would-be parents. Combs, to demonstrate that she knows whereof she speaks, describes how she suffered a miscarriage before setting out to rebalance her body and synchronize it with natural rhythms. In doing so, she claims to have learned that “building a baby does not begin at conception.” She encourages prospective mothers to create a healthy environment long before attempting to conceive, writing that parents-to-be can use herbal therapies to enhance fertility and health. She supports a diet of “nutrient-dense, traditional foods and farm fresh products” to promote gut health and proper digestion—grass-fed, organic meats and raw milk included. Readers may be most interested, though, in Combs’s color-coded “Healthy Baby Herbal Reference Guide,” which recommends various herbs as being most effective for preconception, pregnancy, and lactation, and also names herbs to avoid or use with caution. This intriguingly unusual pregnancy guide strives to leave readers not only educated about the medicinal powers of plants, but also empowered to rely on their own intuition and best judgment. (Nov.)