01/16/2026
After supporting births for 10+ years, there’s one pregnancy pattern I keep seeing. 👇🏼
During pregnancy, your blood volume can more than double! To accommodate this, your liver uses the protein you eat to create osmotic pressure (a fancy way of saying it keeps the fluids in your vessels).
Quality salt consumption also creates osmotic pressure! If you have a healthy heart/kidneys, salt restriction reduces the pull that keeps fluids in the vessels, causing the blood volume to decrease. The body doesn’t understand you just need more salt, it sees that the blood volume is lowering, assumes you’re hemorrhaging, and begins trying to preserve the internal organs.
The kidneys produce renin, an enzyme that causes the blood vessels to restrict, this constriction causes the blood pressure to rise.
"Treating" this rise with salt/weight restriction = more of a blood volume drop = more production of renin = more constriction of blood vessels = an even higher blood pressure. 😬
During all of this, the kidneys are ALSO trying to increase the blood volume by reabsorbing as much water as possible.
The kidneys keep reabsorbing water at one end, while the water is leaking out of the capillaries at the other end, and the woman sees rapid swelling/weight gain from water retention. Most providers still try to treat the symptoms alone instead of addressing the underlying reason, which is obviously unsuccessful, and the complications start adding up.
Several midwifery models have patients follow a high-protein diet, salting to taste… especially in the last months before delivery. In return, they see less cases. For example, The Farm Midwifery center had only 11 cases of pre-eclampsia out of 2,844 births. That's 0.4%! 🙌🏼
In contrast, the national average is 1 in 25 pregnancies. The Brewer Diet addresses these underlying nutritional causes, and is the first thing I recommend looking into for doula clients with a history of pre-e.
Change your perception a bit?? 🫶🏼
