It Takes Guts!
Hey! Thanks for checking out my blog, The Terroir of Birth.
I’ll start by giving you a little bit of my background and the origins of this project-
I’m Sophie, a student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. I’ve spent this year in the program Terroir: Chocolate, Oysters, and Other Place Flavored Foods studying ‘the taste of the earth’ through the lenses of geology, permaculture, and cultural theory. For the second half of the spring quarter, students are free to study any food or food related subject anywhere in the world! A large focus of the program is on how we experience taste; I will be looking closer at the way food interacts with the body in terms of nutrition and health.
I am pursuing a career as a midwife, so this year I have been connecting pregnancy and birth with what I’ve been learning in the terroir program. Within my project, ‘the taste of place’ relates to the what type of food and care is accessible to mothers and children at various socioeconomic standings.
In high school I was fortunate enough to have an incredible farm-to-table health class where I was introduced to general nutrition and ways to nourish my gut. This is also where I first encountered ‘the microbiome’ and ‘the gut-brain connection’.
The microbiome is a fancy word for the one-hundred trillion bacteria that make you, you! 100 trillion bacteria! They live in your gut, brain, on your skin, everywhere. These bacteria help you do and process many of the things you encounter everyday. Where did they come from? Well, your first encounter with bacteria occurred the day you were born! Either through the vaginal canal, in the hospital, or wherever you first were.
Which leads me to the gut-brain connection- this is the idea that your gut and brain influence one-another through the ‘communication’ per se between microbes. Some examples include people with celiac disease feeling depressed after gluten consumption, or even the feeling of having a knot in your stomach or low appetite when anxious!
There is also some incredible research out there regarding the long-term health effects of being born vaginally versus being born through cesarean section, being breast fed versus formula fed, and if you were given antibiotics as a child. In short, there are a large number of factors influencing the structure of your microbiome, and in this blog I will be taking a deeper look into what those factors are and who they influence the most.
That’s all for now- check back soon for videos, more posts, and interviews!
*Disclaimer* I use predominantly she/her/hers pronouns throughout my blog when referring to people who give birth. I’d like to recognize that not every person who is pregnant, gives birth, or breast feeds identifies with these pronouns, and they are not intended to be exclude any persons experience.
