Speaker 1: 00:00 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G. gives you the tools you need to boost your health, and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry: 00:13 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Time and time again, women have told me that their doctor doesn’t listen to them, and for women having babies, that’s just the half of it. In a recent World Health Organization survey, one in six women reported experiencing mistreatment, such a verbal abuse, discrimination, and having their requests for help ignored during childbirth.
The rates of women of color being mistreated are actually especially high. Tennis player Serena Williams’ ignored health concerns related to the birth of her daughter, is just one example of this epidemic. I mean, Serena Williams’ concerns were ignored. Of course, this dilemma can do serious damage, not just from the physical standpoint, but from an emotional one too.
My guest today says it’s become increasingly normal for women to feel unsupported, disempowered, and even traumatized when they give birth, and she’s working to help change that. In just a moment, I’ll be speaking with writer and activist Milli Hill.
Milli Hill is the founder of the Positive Birth Movement, a global network of prenatal support groups, formed through social media, with the aim of improving childbirth. She’s also the author of the 2017 book The Positive Birth Book. In her latest book, which is out just now, Give Birth Like a Feminist, she answers questions such as, why should society advocate care about women having a positive birth experience? Why should women expect or demand more from their birth? Why isn’t a healthy baby and a healthy mom equally as important for our healthcare system?
Today, we’ll discuss the imbalance of power in the delivery room, and how the healthcare industry, and society as a whole, needs a serious overhaul when it comes to pregnancy and birth. We’ll also discuss how women can take control of their births, and how people around them can show their support. So, partners, boyfriends, husbands, and brothers, you’ll want to listen to this too.
Milli, it’s great to have you on the program, and thanks for joining us from across the pond.
Milli Hill: 02:45 Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s wonderful to be here.
Dr. Gundry: 02:49 In your book, you share your experience giving birth with your first child. What did you take away from that experience?
Milli Hill: 02:58 Well, it was a bit of a mixed bag for me, but I think I was a bit traumatized by the experience, a bit shell shocked. I needed a bit of time to reflect afterwards, and process what had happened. I spent quite a lot of the first days and weeks of motherhood going over and over what had happened, and processing it.
I guess, what I took away, was that all of the preparation I’d done in advance hadn’t prevented me from ending up with my feet in stirrups. I’d wanted to have this positive, empowered experience, and it didn’t quite work out for me. Yeah, I did feel really disappointed. I felt sad, a bit physically damaged. I guess what I took away from it is that, there’s more to a good birth than simply getting out of it alive, because myself and my baby were well and healthy, but everything wasn’t really right in my world at that time.
Dr. Gundry: 03:56 What about that experience were you unprepared for? I mean, did you go through … here in America, you take Lamaze classes, and you get coaching in the birth experience, but obviously, that didn’t prepare you for what you actually experienced.
Milli Hill: 04:18 Yeah. I think it’s a complex sort of mixed bag. I think society had already prepared me for birth, even before I started preparing for birth, by giving me very negative expectations, and a lot of fear and anxiety around what birth was going to be like, which I tried to then counter as a pregnant woman by doing reading and preparation, but I think it was in there from a very early age, fear and dread, and cultural messages that I’d received.
I think then, no matter what preparation you do, you then go into a birth system that isn’t necessarily set up to support women’s physiology, and to support women during birth, in the way that they need supporting. So, it’s a complicated set of circumstances, but I think really it’s about having confidence in yourself, and then the system having confidence in you as a woman, and your ability to give birth.
Dr. Gundry: 05:15 What about that experience spurred you to become an advocate for women’s rights, before, during and after giving birth?
Milli Hill: 05:24 Well, I think that experience, and then my second birth experience, which was a very positive, empowering birth, at home, both really played a part in my thinking. But also, hearing the birth stories of other women, really spurred me on. Family, friends, people at their local mother and baby group, every women I spoke to seemed to have a similar kind of disempowered narrative. That really spurred me on more.
The thing that really got me, was what I now call the language of permission, which is women talking about their birth stories in terms of what they were allowed, or not allowed to do. I heard that in so many women’s birth stories. It had been part of my own first birth story. I just thought, as a feminist and a modern women of the 21st century, what is going on here? Where women are talking about birth in terms of what they are allowed and not allowed to do, and always being the permission-seekers rather than the permission-givers in the birth room.
Dr. Gundry: 06:25 Give me an example. Obviously, we now have two totally different experiences. One sounds like a typical hospital setting, and then, your second child was obviously a home birth. What happened in that space that was so different? In other words, what got you to doing it a completely different way the second time around?
Milli Hill: 06:50 I think a few different things. One of the things was the quality of the support that I called in for the second birth. Another thing was just a change in my own mindset. I realized, after the first baby, that when I was pregnant for the second time, I realized that I was actually definitely going to have to give birth, whereas, I think in my first pregnancy, I was kind of keeping my fingers crossed, that maybe there’d be some other option.
So, I faced facts in the second pregnancy. I forced myself to watch birth films, which I wasn’t able to do in my first pregnancy because I was so terrified, and that really helped me. I can remember, in particular, watching one film of a woman giving birth in a birth pool. It was quite dark, and dimly lit. There was nobody else in the frame, in the picture, and she was just very quietly rocking and moving in the water and then occasionally groaning. And then, suddenly, pop up … up through the water came this baby, and that was really transformative for me. I’d never seen a birth like that. I’d always seen your very stereotypical one born every minute, woman in distress, in a hospital birth. That was the frame of reference I had.
I did some work around changing my own expectations and frame of reference, and really facing up to my fears. But also, I got some midwives in the UK. In the UK we have midwives called independent midwives, and they tend to work outside of the system. They’re still qualified midwives, but they’re … They were just amazing. They just came in and brought with them a very different energy, a real confidence in me, so it was a combination of those two things, I think.
Dr. Gundry: 08:31 Had you started the Positive Birth Movement before your second birth, or was that a culmination of after that birth?
Milli Hill: 08:39 No, it was after that birth, so birth was something I was thinking about more and more. I was writing about it, because I do write, and blog, and that kind of thing. So, I was talking to more and more women, and writing, and then I did some training as a birth doula. I don’t know if you know about doulas. Have you had some doulas discussing on your program what they do? It just like a special birth companion, not a medical person, just somebody to be with the woman when she’s a baby.
So, I was getting more and more interested and involved in birth. It was at that point, after my second baby, that I thought, well, maybe I could have a group at my house, where woman came to just talk to each other about birth, rather than an ante-natal class. Maybe we could just have this circle of women, who just listen to each other, listen to birth stories, inform each other through their words.
And then, because social media was quite big around that time, it was becoming bigger and bigger, especially Facebook, I thought, ooh, I wonder if we could have other groups like this, and then link them up somehow, through a social media umbrella, and everybody could power up, because there would be these other lines of communication beyond the immediate world. So I had this idea and I just floated it on the internet and it just snowballed immediately and became huge and it’s been growing and gathering size ever since.
Dr. Gundry: 10:02 So Milli, give me a brief description, because perhaps a lot of our listeners and viewers don’t know this, what is a positive birth experience like? What does it look like? What does it feel like?
Milli Hill: 10:16 Well, I think it’s different for different women. You can’t necessarily say there’s one … you can’t have one description for a positive birth experience, but the common denominators when you speak to women tend to be that women are where they want to be, which is different for different women, women are where they feel safe, and women feel in control, women feel powerful, and they feel respected, and they feel listened to. That can take place anywhere from, as we said earlier, the ocean to the operating theater and everywhere in between. So it’s not about where you are, it’s about how you’re being treated and how you feel.
And for me, I just felt, and for a lot of women that I’ve spoken to, for me that positive experience did come from feeling that power of my body, and feeling how strong I was, because I was actually doing it, and nailing it, if you know what I mean. Natural birth in a birth pool was a really positive experience for me, but for other people that may not be what they’re after. As long as people are where they want to be and they feel they’re listened to and respected, then that is their positive birth.
Dr. Gundry: 11:24 That’s perfect.
In your book you talk that giving birth is a feminist issue that nobody is talking about, why do you think that is? Because obviously you’ve boomed on social media, why isn’t this as big an issue as it ought to be?
Milli Hill: 11:42 I think it’s a complicated mixture of reasons. I think women’s bodies have a long history of being subjugated in all areas, but then what happens with birth is that we throw into the mix this presence of an unborn baby, which because of a mixture of patriarchy and religion, it often means that society feels that they can legitimately prioritize the baby over the women. The women is just a vessel that we have a history of thinking of women in these terms, of the woman as a vessel or a container for that baby.
And then you get into the mix of that … the idea that being a good mother somehow involves sacrificing your own needs, your own identity, etcetera. Then what happens in modern birth is we get these phrases coming out like, leave your dignity at the door. That a woman has to accept any treatment in the name of safety in birth because a healthy baby is all that matters. Women are told this frequently at trips of the tongue around the birth conversations. Women hear this phrase, a healthy baby is all that matters, and I think women very often feel silenced by that. They want to raise concerns, they want to complain about the maternity care, they want to ask for things to be different, but doing so somehow positions them as the selfish mother who cares more about herself than about her baby. I think that’s the main reason why we have a lack of dialogue around birth as a feminist issue.
Also, obviously birth is an exclusively female experience and so we then have the issue that feminism has been about equality and so we tend to, feminists tend to gravitate towards areas where we can have conversations around equality, whereas in birth that’s a bit more complicated, isn’t it? Because men don’t do it.
I think there’s a few things, few reasons, preventing the conversation. But I think when you actually talk to other women about why it’s a feminist issue, which for me essentially means women are not getting a good deal out of this experience and we need to have a conversation about how it can be improved, then it’s obvious that it is a feminist issue and that it needs our attention.
Dr. Gundry: 13:55 When you say it’s a feminist issue, I think what you’re saying is that you can give birth in any setting and in any way, whether it’s an elective caesarian section in a private hospital, to free birth in the middle, in the ocean for instance. Talk me through that. How do you advise people to take control of the situation, because clearly, in the United States as well, so many of these decision, I want to get into that, the control is taken away from the pregnant mother.
Milli Hill: 14:31 Yup. And it’s kind of the same in the UK as well. And I think a lot of women don’t realize that they have the legal right to be in control of what happens to them in birth and that they are the key decision maker. They have the right to be at the center of the decision making and to be the person who calls the shots. Probably for some of the reasons I’ve just mentioned as well about, like I said about positioning yourself as the bad mother because you have desires, needs, wants, as well as the baby.
Giving birth like a feminist just means being aware that you have those choices and those rights and that you’re allowed to care about birth as an experience that’s important to you in your life.
I’ve always been really passionate about the message with the Positive Birth Movements as well. That it’s not about prescribing one kind of birth. I know I’ve had a couple of babies at home myself in a birth pool but it doesn’t mean that everybody has to do that. It’s really about women knowing that they can choose what feels right for them and have that sense of entitlement and a knowledge of how they deserve to be treated. It’s not about holding up one kind of birth as better than another kind of birth.
Dr. Gundry: 15:42 Yeah, I want to dive into that a lot, because I’ve had a number of experiences with my patients and advocating for them during their birth process, which really, for lack of a better word pissed me off, because I had to go against obstetricians who were taking this woman in a direction she clearly did not want to go and I actually … we’ll get into that.
We’re going to take a break for a second, but when we come back I really want to talk about why women aren’t prepared for the various options and what you’re doing about that to really give women a chance to speak up about that.
So stay right there, we’re going to take a short break and we’ll come right back.
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So welcome back to the Dr. Gundry podcast. My guest today is a positive birth activist and author, Milli Hill.
Now, before the break, you were talking about what it meant to give birth like a feminist. And actually, I just got back from a meeting called Brilliant Minds in Stockholm, Sweden, and one of the presentation was with a woman who was one of the first to receive a uterus transplant, and has successfully gone on to have a child with a transplanted uterus.
She was born without a uterus. It’s a rare, congenital condition, and she was told, you can’t have kids, sorry. She accepted that, and then she fell in love, and she told her husband, look, I’m sorry, I can’t have a child. And he says, that’s ridiculous, of course you can have a child, in this day and age why can’t you? And she actually found a donor for a uterus, an older woman who was a friend of her and was 60 years old and didn’t need hers anymore, and it’s a big deal. But she had a successful child.
The reason I bring that up, is during the question and answer with her surgeon and obstetrician who pioneered this work, he says, you know, actually we’ve been approached by several men who want a uterus transplant so that they can have the birth experience. So we all went … So he said, let’s have a show of hands. Men, who wants to have the birth experience? I think there were maybe two men in the audience put their hand up, and my wife was sitting next to me and she jabs me like this. But, it just brings up all sorts of … Can you imagine if, I think you can, what if men had been in control of having a birth, how things would change. So, that’s a long winded way of, you’re in control of your birth, and yet the vast majority of obstetricians in this country, and I suspect in the UK, are men, or women who have been trained in a men guided system. How do you take control back?
Milli Hill: 19:44 That was a long question! There’s so much there to unpack.
Well, I think just knowing that you are in control is the first step to being in control. Knowing that you have human rights in child birth. There’s a growing movement to educate women about human rights in child birth. There are lots of organizations around the world who are starting to advocate for women on that level. So I think knowing that you have a choice is really important.
Like I said, when I talked to pregnant women sometimes and their partners about their birth choices, sometimes the take away point, and this really shocks me, the take away point for them is not so much about all the details of their choices, but the very fact that they have a choice. That’s the message that we need to be getting out above everything else really. Is that it is okay to think about your choices in birth and to question, and to wonder, and to make difference decisions to other people, or maybe decisions that may be standard or recommended.
I think that’s the thing really, is just to know that you’re in charge. Know that you have the right to make these decisions, and don’t be afraid to speak up and say what you want. Know that you matter.
Dr. Gundry: 21:05 Can you shop physicians and midwives? Is that okay? And how do you go about doing that?
Milli Hill: 21:14 Can you shop around, do you mean?
Dr. Gundry: 21:17 Yeah, shop around. Can you say, tell me about what you see during my pregnancy and during my birth, and here’s what I’m thinking. Is that now allowed? Well, not allowed, but should be that be the discussion?
Milli Hill: 21:32 I think so. I think that we do have some cultural changes to make. I don’t think this is going to happen overnight, because I think at the moment women who try to behave like that in their maternity care are often cast as divas, birthzillas, they make their … they have their laminate … this word is used! Women with their laminated birth plans, you hear all these negative jibes about women who try to be in the driving seat. So it’s not always easy to do but I think that in itself speaks volumes about how necessary it is and how important it is that women do play that role. Don’t be put back in your box.
Whether or not you can actually shop around I think depends on where you live in the world, and what kind of support you’ve got, and what the infrastructure is. But yes, recently at a birth show in the UK where I said on the stage, somebody said about not getting on with their midwife, and I said, well you could always ask for a different midwife. Again, people were quite shocked at that idea. I’m shocked that that’s a shock.
Why don’t people know that if they don’t feel comfortable … You’re about to give birth, it’s a very intimate experience where your emotions and how you’re feeling play a big role in how your body behaves. There’s mind body relationship at work and if you’re in the presence of somebody who’s making you feel uncomfortable, that could have a direct impact on how your body births and how your body opens or does not open. So, of course you have the absolute right to say, I need somebody different with me in this room. Why shouldn’t that be okay?
Dr. Gundry: 23:16 Yeah, that’s a great point. And you mentioned, have you had one water birth or two water births?
Milli Hill: 23:23 Yep, I’ve had three babies. I’m not having anymore. Totally done.
Yeah, my second two were born in water at home.
Dr. Gundry: 23:33 I’m a huge advocate of that.
I’m writing a book. It’s in my series of books. I actually firmly believe that women were designed to give birth in the water, and there is huge amount of evidence that the birth process is so much easier for the woman and the baby to give birth in water. I think there’s actually very solid evidence that that’s how it used to be done.
Milli Hill: 24:06 The real evidence as well as if you just talk to women who’ve done it, not just me. I’ve never been able to find a woman who had a water birth who hated it. And I think there’s something about the protectiveness as well that it gives you.
Unfortunately, in the current system, I think it’s quite difficult for women to get that kind of hands off birth. Where the professionals … We need the professional to be there. I’m not saying that. We need medical backup in birth, that is very important. It’s one of the things that makes birth safe. But women feel safe when they are, quite often when they have a bit of distance and are able to get on with it and ask for help if they need it.
But the water offers that opportunity really to be a bit protected. It’s a bit more difficult for people to get to you when you’re in water and I think as a laboring woman you feel that and you feel a sense of relief that you’ve got that little bit of distance between yourself and everybody who’s in the room.
Dr. Gundry: 25:06 Let me, and let you and I assure everyone who is raising their eyebrows about water birth, that the baby is actually in water while inside of you and it’s the most natural thing in the world to come out of you still in water. Babies have a gasping reflex and there’s nobody who drowns in a water birth.
Milli Hill: 25:34 No, that’s definitely a misconception. And a falsely placed anxiety that some people have, but the baby as you’ve said as the dive reflex so they don’t breathe until they come up, and they’re still attached to the umbilical cord so they’re still getting their oxygen just as they were when they were in the water filled amniotic sac.
Dr. Gundry: 25:54 I wanted to have you on the podcast because I really relate to your new book’s theme. Advocating for women’s health is something I’ve been speaking about for a very long time. I’ve been on the Morning Joe news show here in the United States because women simply aren’t being heard by their doctors. And I really think this needs to change.
In my own practice, female patients with autoimmune disease actually have seen six to ten doctors who brushed off their concerns before they found me. You’re right. Women are absolutely not being heard on that.
I’d like to give you a couple of personal examples and get your take on this. And they’re actually both about caesarian sections. I have one patient who luckily has been in remission for rheumatoid arthritis because she did not want to have a second pregnancy while on these immunosuppressant drugs. And she had a lovely second child, but her doctor wanted her to have a caesarian section a second time round as a safety factor, and she agreed, she actually has a very small pelvis. And her doctor would not do a vaginal swab and swab the baby’s mouth and nose after birth. And she said, that’s ridiculous. My baby has to have my vaginal microbiome to start the immune system. And he said that’s just ridiculous, there’s no evidence for that. And I actually had to write a prescription to her obstetrician, and only when he was confronted with that was he willing to do it. This is someone who quite frankly does not know the science, the immunology, behind how important the vaginal birth and the vaginal microbiome is in setting up the baby for success in this day and age.
Milli Hill: 28:12 But also, even if the woman was incorrect about the science. Just hypothetically let’s say that she was. If she wants to do that with her vagina and her baby then he should not stand between her … What is his right to say that she is not allowed to put her own vaginal bacteria onto her own baby?
Good healthcare should not be about supporting women in their decisions that you personally as their doctor agree with. It should be about supporting women in decisions that you probably don’t agree with because you have to accept that it is their body, their baby, their choice.
Dr. Gundry: 28:51 And that brings up my second patient. Not my patient, actually. We became good friends with a waiter who happens to be Hispanic. His wife was having her second pregnancy and she had had a caesarian section fairly as an emergency caesarian section, and she was very educated and wanted to attempt vaginal birth the second time around. And her obstetrician said absolutely no. There’s not way I’m going to chance it. You’re going to have a caesarian section. The waiter, he’s talking to me, and he says what do you think about that. I said, well wait a minute, there’s huge amount of evidence that you can successfully have a vaginal birth following a caesarian section you just have to find the right physician who’s willing to accommodate your wife. And be ready to do a caesarian section, but let’s see how far it goes.
So they actually traveled about 50 miles from their home into Los Angeles to find a physician who would say, of course, we need to try that but here’s the risk, but we’re going to do it in a hospital setting and they traveled the 50 miles and they scheduled it. She was induced. And she successfully carried a normal vaginal birth. If she didn’t know that was possible, if she’d accepted the first obstetricians, no way I’m not going to do that. They love the fact that … yes, they traveled 50 miles, but it was a scheduled inducement, and they were delighted. Again, how do you help women get this power?
Milli Hill: 30:52 I think the sharing of information is really important, and that’s why I started the Positive Birth Movement is so women could talk to other women and that example that you’ve just given is a classic example.
I’ve had women talk to me … there was a woman in the UK that wanted to have a woman centered caesarian, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it’s where the caesarian birth is geared around the women, centered around the woman, more so. Perhaps the screen is lowered so she can see the baby being born, she might have optimal cord clamping, she might have skin to skin, she might have music being played. The clinician in the room keep a lower volume and a bit more of a reverential respect for that bit, etc..
This was the kind of birth that she wanted and she posted on social media saying that she didn’t know what to do because she’d been told it wasn’t possible where she lived. And an obstetrician popped up, because obstetricians are on the Positive Birth Movement social media as well, to say, hi, I do that kind of caesarian, come to me. So she traveled, like your story, she traveled 50 or 100 miles away and had the caesarian birth that she really wanted and it was a healing experience for her because she’d had quite traumatic experiences prior to that. It really meant a lot to her beyond just that one day. For her it was a very important life experience that she took forward and that gave her a lot of strength and inspiration as she went forward through her life. It’s really important to her.
I think that sharing of information that social media has made possible is actually really fantastic. Women sharing their stories and saying well, over here where I live they don’t even tell you that, or they tell you this, or this doctor told me this, and it’s just those little ripples really can be helpful to change and give women a better sense of their choices.
Dr. Gundry: 32:45 How does a woman share these views with her doctor or her midwife? Is there a good way to handle it short of coming across as a self centered feminist diva?
Milli Hill: 32:58 Birthzilla?
Well, I don’t think we should have to dress up our needs and our desires too much in order to make the other person feel comfortable. Because birth is the women’s experience, it’s not the doctor’s or the midwife’s baby or birth, so to some extent we need to be strong, stand up right, and just believe in ourselves and use our voices. However, we don’t want to go to war and alienate people, so obviously it’s great if you can build really good bridges and rapports and relationship with your health care providers. If that can happen, that’s wonderful.
For me, the bottom line more and more is that women need to not be apologetic about what they want in child birth, because they may only do it once or twice in their whole life and it can be a very empowering, important experience, a very transformative experience for them, or it can be the exact opposite and be violating, traumatic, and take a long time for them to recover from. It matters and it’s okay for it to matter.
Dr. Gundry: 34:17 And do you spell out all these ways to do this in your new book? What’s a takeaway from the new book?
Milli Hill: 34:28 I think all of those things that I’ve just said. Knowing that you matter is really important. Challenging this cultural idea that a healthy baby is all that matters is a big takeaway from my book. We all know that everybody wants to come out of birth with a pulse and alive and that’s great, but we need to remove this idea from the healthy baby from the pinnacle of expectations and put it down to the baseline expectation. That should be the bare minimum that people get from birth. That it’s okay to feel that you matter.
I’ve very passionate about making a birth plan, I think that’s weirdly, although you wouldn’t necessarily automatically think it, I think making a birth plan can be quite feminist issue. Like I said earlier, people who do make plans sometimes they get mocked. They get told, awe look at this woman with her ten page laminated birth plan. She’s a control freak or whatever. I think that’s a subtle way of undermining people who are actually doing something quite reasonable. They are trying to take control in a situation where a lot of women are coming out telling their stories where there was no … they had no control. So what would your reasonable response be to that situation if you like you said earlier, you used the example of a man giving birth. How would you approach it if you’d heard all these stories of people who went in and felt completely out of control? Well you may well make a ten page laminated birth plan. We need to see that a response to the current system, but also we need to see that with respect. This is a woman who really cares about the experience and who’s done her homework and who knows what her options are and is interested in taking an active role in it, so why would you want to deride or mock that woman?
That would be my advice. Make a birth plan. Get informed. Know that you matter and don’t be afraid to say what you want. Use your voice and also, I have to say, if you don’t feel that you’re properly treated please complain. I really would like women who have had birth experiences in which they feel they weren’t given the respect and the compassionate care that they deserved to actually speak up about that. Because I think often that’s part of the same package that we’ve been talking about of being told, oh well that’s just how birth is. That’s just how it goes for women. You just have to get on with it and enjoy your healthy baby. So women just keep quiet about it and think, well this is just what it was like, I have to suck it up. But I think it’s really important that women actually do complain and say no that could have been better for me.
Dr. Gundry: 37:00 You’re right about this laminated birth plan. In this day and age we wouldn’t think about taking a trip or doing a commute without activating our Google Map or Android Map or our Apple Map to have directions along the way and to know what’s in store at each stop. My goodness, why wouldn’t you do that in birth? That’s a great point.
Milli Hill: 37:25 And have a plan B as well. We always would have a plan B wouldn’t we? If we were making place for our wedding photos in the rose garden we would think well if it rains we’ll take them in the archway or whatever. When you’re making your birth plan it’s not about having … I think some people mistakenly see birth plans as a fixation on one particular kind of birth and if it doesn’t go that way I’m going to have a tantrum.
I don’t think women are actually really like that mostly. I think we’re all pretty intelligent, reasonable people. You have to think about it just like you think about any other plans in life. This is my absolute, what I really want plan, and this is my contingency plan, and this is what I’m going to do if I don’t get what I want.
Dr. Gundry: 38:07 Absolutely. Well Milli, it’s been great having you on the podcast today and this is really an important aspect of women’s health, as are all aspects of women’s health. I think this is just another example that women really need to speak up and demand your rights for great health and great health in the birth process.
So will you tell our listeners where they can find out more information about you and your work?
Milli Hill: 38:37 Yep, you can find me on social media, on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And you can find the Positive Birth Movement on social media. If you want to find your nearest Positive Birth Movement group, it’s at www.positivebirthmovement.org. And obviously you can get my books, The Positive Birth Book and Give Birth Like a Feminist on Amazon and from all good book sellers.
Dr. Gundry: 38:59 Very good. Okay, it’s time for one of my very favorite parts of the podcast and that’s the audience question.
Daniella Stella on Instagram asks, have you heard of pili nuts? I’m wondering about their lectin content and they’re not on your good lists.
Well yes, actually I have heard of pili nuts, and I actually have some at home. One of the reasons they’re not on the good or bad list is number one, they’re actually very expensive and you don’t get a whole lot for the money, but they don’t have lectins in them so go ahead and get them. `
But I want to give a shout out to a fairly new company out of New York called Lavva, L-A-V-V-A, they make a yogurt that’s all plant based primarily based on pili nuts and sorghum flour. I’ve had it, it’s great. They’re in most Whole Food now but if you actually go to their website you can find them locally. On the west coast they’re also in Sprouts Markets so be on the lookout. If you want some pili nuts that are reasonably priced, find yourself some Lavva yogurt, but great question.
And let me add a disclaimer, I have absolutely no relationship with Lavva, I have no commercial interest in them, I just think they’re a great company and ought to be supported if you’re looking for pili nuts.
So this is Dr. Gundry signing off from the Dr. Gundry podcast, we’ll see you next week and thanks again Milli for being on.
Milli Hill: 40:27 Thank you so much.
Dr. Gundry: 40:28 Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to watch each episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you can always find me on YouTube at YouTube.com/DrGundry, because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
