White foods and getting pregnant

I grew up on white bread. I loved it. So soft and chewy....oh, I can just imagine it now. And french bread with its crusty outside and soft inside. The transition to wheat bread was rough, but I did it, and you can, too. The so-called "white foods" do not do you any good when you're hoping to conceive.

Why is "white food" so bad? I mean, it's tastes good and it's fortified, right? Anything that has to be fortified should make you question it. If it naturally had vitamins, nobody would have to add them back. The processing that wheat goes through to make white bread drains all the vitamins out of it.

Aside from losing the vitamins and iron that wheat naturally possesses, there is another reason why you should avoid white bread and things like that. White bread is nothing but carbohydrates with some vitamins tossed back in. To make it worse, white bread is simple carbohydrates that are essentially sugar to your body. A big carbohydrate kick causes your body to secrete insulin quickly in response. And that's the problem. It makes your body start to convert more glucose to fat, and more fat means your estrogen increases.

Ideally, the food you eat stimulates only small amounts of insulin secretion on a fairly regular basis so that you have neither peaks nor dips in the balance of glucose and insulin. That means that a regular stream of glucose and insulin is winding its way through your body, including to your ovaries.

There are great alternatives to white food. Try brown rice pasta. I think it's even better than wheat pasta as it's hard to overcook and has a great flavor. Eat sprouted bagels and muffins. If you eat wheat bread, make sure there is not much sugar added (e.g. avoid the honey wheat breads). Take a pass on the bagels and doughnuts, although an occasional one is understandable.

Use the 80/20 rule with food--aim to eat 80% of your calories from high-quality foods and just 20% from junk foods. At first, this seems hard, but over time, you begin to feel better from eating better, and you don't even want the "bad" foods anymore.