 Today, Devine, who is a mother, a certified lactation counselor, a doula, a prenatal health coach, and a traditional herbalist, is going to be presenting for us foods from the African Dyes for us. She resides in the United States in the Louisiana area, and she has noted the research just giving us birth outcomes of African American babies who are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than their white American counterpart. The racial and ethnic disparities in prenatal and newborn care in the United States are astonishing. We know that good nutrition is the building block to healthy pregnancy. As birth workers, we're getting culturally competent nutritional assessments, or at least we're trying to, and so the goal today is to just to provide us with some nutritional suggestions that take into account the mother's ethnic background and personal food history. And so the presentation will be looking specifically at foods eaten in Africa, the Caribbean, and the southern United States, and offering healthy choices for mothers and their babies to have a really healthy start. We'll also be discussing foods that support health issues, specific to pregnant women of African descent, such as sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiency, and premature labor, which is certainly some of the outcomes that are relevant for this population. So without much ado, I would like to go ahead and ask Devine to go ahead and share with us. Thank you Devine. Devine, for some reason, your microphone is not showing up. I saw it earlier, but I don't see it now. If you press on your microphone button, perhaps you can start speaking. It could be that there's a loose connection where your headset plugs into your computer, because we're not able to hear you. Apologize. You just have some technical difficulty. Maybe Devine can just send me a chat, a note in the chat bar. We were communicating just a moment ago, and her mic was working just fine. We still can't hear you, Devine, you know, and I know a few moments ago your mic was actually showing up, the icon was there, and it worked perfectly when we tried it last night. So this is just Murphy's Law, which is the same for when you expect everything to go smoothly. Sometimes there's a surprise. We're still not hearing you. Did you want to go through your audio wizard again? Are you, maybe can you type something in the chat? Okay, you're going to meeting and you're trying to adjust. I just heard something a moment ago. You're now connected. So if you just unmute yourself, you can have the floor. I can see the recording bar is moving, and my microphone is working properly. We can now hear you for the first time. All of a sudden, we couldn't hear you again, and we no longer see the mic showing up. Whatever you did a moment ago, maybe you could try it again. Hello. Can you hear me? And we won't have you turn it off. Just keep it on. We hear you now. Just turned it off. You might want to unmute. Hello. Can you hear me? Hello? Yes. Okay, good. I'm sorry about that. Okay. All birth workers know that good nutrition is a vital building block to positive birth outcomes. In the WIFRI model of care, close interaction with the client allows us to take more time to discuss proper nutrition, food choices, even shared recipes. There are many pregnancy discomforts that can be eased through nutrition, adequate water intake can prevent premature labor, eating bananas for potassium, can eat leg cramping, garlic and garlic water can lower high blood pressure. So how are we approaching clients of African descent, whether they live in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, the African continent, Central and South America, or the Caribbean? Are we taking into account cultural differences in foods, taboos about food during pregnancy when we make suggestions? And that's very important. So you see here I have support. Prenatal nutrition obviously prevents unnecessary pregnancy discomfort. It supports the development of healthy fetus and baby for birth outcome. It assists mother in staying healthy throughout the pregnancy. And so as birth workers, when we do culturally competent nutritional assessments, we have to do more than give a list of foods like, oh, you know, you don't have cheese, milk, broccoli, whole grains, legumes, spinach, and then just have a long list of vitamins and minerals. This does nothing to specifically reflect the mother's food history or culture. So to ensure better nutrition with our black mothers, I suggest that it's better to engage in a conversation about her food history. Are there any foods that she doesn't eat? Are there any religious or cultural reasons why she doesn't eat that particular food? Are there foods that she eats and has easy access to that can fulfill a certain nutritional need? For instance, and this is just an example of things that we may tell mothers that's not culturally competent. One common suggestion that I commonly hear over and over again while I read on a lot of Western pregnancy sites is when you're pregnant, don't eat spicy food. Well, if a mother doesn't personally have a tongue for spicy food and it doesn't agree with her, that's one thing. That's an obvious decision to make that she shouldn't eat spicy food. But if she comes from a culture that likes to put shavonit pepper or ginger or cayenne pepper in the base of their cooking, spicy is relative. The mother probably or may not have an aversion to it being spicy whatsoever. So this really should not be an automatic suggestion. So this is, for instance, I'm born and raised in Chicago. My food history is my grandparents are all from Mississippi and Alabama. And so I grew up eating greens, cornbread, chitlins, beans with okra in it. I remember breaking down hot water cornbread with pot liquor, which is the water that you cook the greens from. And we would eat that with our hands. Even though I live in the city, I had a food history of the South. And guess what? We ate tons of pepper and hot sauce. My mother ate peppers all through her pregnancies with us. So you wouldn't tell her, hey, don't eat spicy food. She looked at you like you were crazy. She's going to eat pepper. And in Louisiana, they're going to eat cayenne pepper. That's like a basis of their food. How much one uses maybe is a personal preference, but it's one of the basic ingredients in food. So you want to be, you don't want to just pass that on like that's a matter of fact that you should eat spicy food. OK, so moving right along. General prenatal nutrition recommendations and encouragement that we should be doing is whole foods. OK, we have to tell mothers and we've become in the habit of doing breaking things down, acid, iron, calcium, vitamin D, protein, zinc, vitamin C, A. And then we list foods that have that particular thing. So for instance, we may say an orange has vitamin C. It's great for vitamin C, but that's not the totality of an orange. It has much more than just vitamin C. OK, you're just not your toenail. You're much more than that. Vitamin C is also in mango. And mangoes are abundant in the Caribbean and West Africa. And you can usually buy them if you're in the UK, Canada, United States. You can buy them in Latin and Caribbean markets. And now you can also buy mangoes in regular grocery stores, especially if you use frozen. But the reason I brought up that you just don't want to tell a mother, oh, this is great for vitamin C, because she might say, well, I'm already getting vitamin C for my prenatal pill, or I'm already taking this for vitamin C, so I don't need the mango. But the mango also has fiber, potassium, magnesium, vitamin A, vitamin B6. It's rich in iron. It's also low on a glycemic index. So it's a good fruit to eat if the mother is diabetic or if she's been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. So we don't want to pigeonhole foods to just one nutritional need. And there may be many fruits and vegetables that can cover multiple needs outside of, let's say, meatloaf and green peas. So that is something that's important, and that's what I'm going to go into. Obviously, as far as the diaspora goals, when we talk about proteins, it's an abundance of ways we can go with proteins. You can use goat, lamb, bombara beans, back eye peas, pigeon peas, different fish, poultry, and of course, eggs. They have eggs here in Southwest Louisiana where there's boiled eggs and it's cooked in a brown gravy, and they're served that over rice. You might think, well, that's really like a small meal, but the mother's getting protein, and the gravy usually has onion and other spices in there, she's getting some rice, and maybe you can tell the mother, have a salad or so on the side. But it's an easy and it's a cheap way for her to get her nutritional needs met. And it's also a food that she would be comfortable with that comes from her culture that she's in. And it does look like she has to go outside of herself to get a food that reflects who she is and to remain healthy. Okay, so let's get right into it. I love talking about food, and let's talk about folates because you're only dealing with folic acid when you're dealing with the isolated vitamin or mineral that you're getting in the capsule form. When you're getting folate for food, it is a folate, not a folic acid. Okra is abundant in folate. And we eat a lot of okra in the American South. You have okra all through the Caribbean. You have okra definitely from West Africa, and in certain areas it's called okra. And for instance in Rwanda, which is towards East Africa, it's actually called gumbo. And that is also a name of a dish that we eat here in Louisiana, gumbo. And it has okra in it. So you hear people say, oh, I had me some okra for gumbo. It's kind of redundant because it's like saying you had okra, okra. But it's a stew. And okra is rich in folates, vitamin C, B complex, like niacin, B6. The pods also contain great amounts of vitamin K. And vitamin K is also a good factoring for blood clotting enzymes, and it's good for strengthening the bones. So this is, again, I have it on the folates. But with a lot of these foods that we're going to be talking about, it's more than that. So we have melaton or the olte, which is like a squash. And it also is full of vitamin C, potassium, calcium. And we eat that in the south. Usually it's put in the casserole with stuff. Coconut meat is great. And if you're in an area where you can get fresh coconuts, you open up the coconut after you drink the coconut water, that white flesh is full of folates. Again, potassium, of course, we usually know that coconut water has a lot of potassium, but coconut meat, anesium as well. And millet is a grain. It's an ancient grain that is used in West Africa. You also see it in East Africa. It's generally used a lot in America for bird feed or animals or farms, but more people who are starting a gluten-free diet also use a millet. Let's talk about iron. So we know that green leafy vegetables are also iron. Everybody's in love with kale now. But we also have collards, kalaloo, which can come from the amaranth and their kalaloo is the leaves, fernip, green, spinach, dandelion. But you also have greens that come from the cassava or the yucca root and sweet potato leaves. Bitter leaf is something that can get from a lot of West African markets that they throw in soups. And it's kind of bitter, but it's tons of iron. And jera is made from the tech grain. It's a fermented bread that they eat a lot of in Ethiopia. If you know anything about Ethiopian cuisine, they do eat meat, and they eat a lot of beans as well. But they eat injera with every meal. And it has tons of iron. A millet and one of my favorites for iron is watermelon. It has tons of iron, and a lot of iron is in the seeds as well. So if you get a watermelon, please get a seeded watermelon. If you don't want to eat the seeds, you can throw it in your booter and throw the seeds a couple of the seeds in there. And they're really good. And also, watermelon has water in it that is in fiber. And that's going to help the mother and keep constipation and things of that sort. And again, watermelon is something that you can see on the islands. You can see in West Africa. You can see in stores that cater to people that eat watermelon, eat mangoes, things of that sort. So one of the suggestions I often get mothers are, you may not often see a lot of your foods in a place like Walmart. But if you go to Caribbean groceries and if you go to Latin grocery stores and West African grocery stores, you will be your fruits, your vegetables that speak to and talk to your culture. Sickle-cell anemia, we're going to go straight into some of the things that I think I'm missing one. OK, no, I didn't. I'm sorry. Wanted to make sure I didn't skip anything. Sickle-cell anemia, that is cat. Sickle-cell disease is characterized by crescent shaped or sickled red blood cells in chronic anemia. And it results in from the abnormally high destruction of red blood cells. Foods with high amounts of phyosalamic acid