Eating for Two
To this Harvard nutritionist, life doesn’t start at conception. It starts at the dinner table.
- Tot Commodity: Willett, by one count the world's most quoted nutritionist, at Isis Maternity in Needham. Photo by Peter Tannenbaum.
Diet books are big business. Diet books written by scientists, even more so. Diet books written by scientists that purport to help women get pregnant? A potentially unbeatable publishing trifecta—so get ready for the publicity circus (and endless daytime TV appearances) that will surely trumpet the arrival of The Fertility Diet, a straddling of scholarship and self-help from Walter Willett, the 62-year-old chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department.
“Evolution has put in place nutritional hurdles a woman must overcome to get pregnant,” says Willett. In the book, which is based on Willett’s 18-year survey of 18,000 women nurses, he offers 10 dietary guidelines he claims will notably increase a would-be mom’s ability to get around those obstacles. Many of the prescriptions—maintaining a healthy weight, refraining from overdoing it with alcohol—aren’t particularly surprising, but one is downright liberating: To boost your odds of warming a bun in the oven, the doctor advises, treat yourself to a dish of full-fat ice cream every day. So a bowl of joy can lead to a bundle of it? There’s an easy sell.
Originally published in Boston magazine, December 2007
