Mama, RN

   With October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I want to take some time to honor the brave women who have fought breast cancer and especially those who have lost that fight. No one wants to hear that they or their loved one has cancer. It is important that we support our friends and family who are fighting cancer and pray for their strength, health, and endurance. It is also important that we come along side those friends that are grieving a loss due to breast cancer and pray that God give them peace during their time of grief.    Since becoming a new mom, I have heard so many times of the importance of breastfeeding for my baby. Every once in a while, someone will also bring up the importance of breastfeeding for moms too! Did you know that breastfeeding our babies can lower our risk of developing breast or gynecological cancers?   I want to put in a side note here. Before I became a mom, I leaned more toward the idea that "breast is best,"...

  NOTE: Mama, RN is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Purchasing from these links brings no addition charge to you! Title:  Natural Hospital Birth: The Best of Both Worlds Author:  Cynthia Gabriel Category:  Non-fiction, Pregnancy and Childbirth Rating:  5/5! Natural Hospital Birth  is an excellent guide for mom's who want to have a natural birth but also want to give birth in the hospital. Cynthia Gabriel shows that while this goal may be hard to achieve, with the right support, it is very possible.  In  Natural Hospital Birth , Cynthia Gabriel, a certified doula, starts by giving tips on how to prepare for your birth. She educates on what decisions you will encounter in the hospital and gives tips on how to decide who your birth team will be. She gives personal stories from othe...

NOTE: Mama, RN is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Purchasing from these links brings no additional charge to you! This post is not intended to diagnose or treat. As promised, I will be listing my top choices for prenatal vitamins. I looked at multiple different brands and chose my new prenatal based on the number and amount of vitamins and minerals present, type of inactive ingredients in the tablets, additional benefits, and cost of the individual doses. If you have not already, please read my previous post Prenatal Vitamins: Part 1 to know what should be in your prenatal vitamins and/or diet.  ACTIF                My number one choice for my new prenatal was ACTIF Organic Prenatal. This vitamin has all the vitamins and minerals I discussed in Part 1, except Vitamin K, an...

  Should you eat peanuts to expose your baby so that they don't have a peanut allergy? This was a recent question that reader asked me. Strangely, I had just read this theory in another place and wondered the same thing.  It does not appear that there is a ton of research on this topic. However, I did find a couple studies that suggest that it may be possible that if a mother eats peanuts then the chances of her baby having a peanut allergy may be lower.  One clinical trial published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology  studied 1277 pairs of mothers and babies. The results showed that mothers who ate more peanuts during pregnancy had babies with 47% less of chance of having peanut allergies (Bunyavanich et al. 2014). Another article published in this same journal suggests that increased peanut consumption during pregnancy may even help to prevent childhood asthma (Maslova et al. 2012). In the journal Frontiers in Immunology, the authors reviewed several...

Note: This post is not intended to diagnose or treat. While researching for this post, I made a shocking and frustrating discovery. When I found out I was pregnant, my primary doctor’s office prescribed me a prenatal vitamin. I picked it up at the pharmacy and it was, of course, in the typical orange pharmacy bottle without any brand name or ingredients listed. I started my research for this post by looking up the code on the bottle and finding the ingredients for my vitamin. I wrote them down and then started looking up important nutrients that should be in a prenatal vitamin and found that it was missing key ingredients including vitamin B7, choline, iodine, magnesium, omega 3 DHA, and vitamin K. In addition to missing these key ingredients, it also had about 25 inactive ingredients including five that I did not find information for, one that has been proven to have high risk of causing cancer, and two unnecessary dyes just to make the tablet pink. This is probably something that my ...