What Dietitians Recommend for Pregnancy, Breastfeeding & Baby Nutrition - Ask a Nutritionist

May 8, 2025

Ever wondered where dietitians turn for trusted nutrition advice during pregnancy, postpartum, and when feeding their little ones? In this episode of Ask a Nutritionist, Leah Kleinschrodt shares top resources recommended by multiple dietitians at Nutritional Weight & Wellness. From books and blogs to social media accounts and expert tips, we’re covering the best go-to guides for nourishing both moms and kids. Whether you’re expecting, breastfeeding, or navigating mealtime with toddlers, this episode is packed with practical, real-food wisdom to support you every step of the way!

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Transcript:

Leah: Hello, and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist” podcast brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt. I'm a Registered and Licensed Dietitian. And this podcast strives to help people around the world make the connection between what they eat and how they feel. Thank you all for your support and listenership over the years. And if you're enjoying this show, let us know by leaving a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback helps others find these important real food messages.

So on today's show, I will be answering a question that we received from one of our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners. This listener actually left us a voicemail message a while back, so yay and thank you. And I think a lot of her questions were covered in recent “Ask a Nutritionist” episodes, but she did have one lingering question at the end of her voicemail that I wanted to share and answer today.

So this listener asks, “In terms of nutritional advice and support for mothers who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or have young kids, what resources did you turn to yourself as a dietitian? There's a lot out there on the internet, and I just haven't known exactly what resources to turn to.”

So I love this question. It gets us down to brass tacks. You know, we as dietitians, we may know a lot about food and we help clients with a variety of nutrition issues, but that doesn't mean we still don't need help, guidance, or just someone to give us some confidence or tell us that we're doing a good job in terms of nourishing our bodies during these really unique stages in life and then to help nourish our children's bodies also.

So I actually posed this question to all the nutritionists and dietitians at Nutritional Weight & Wellness to make sure I had as comprehensive of a list as possible. And I will say there was about 90 percent overlap in the answers between us all. So for the most part, we are all looking to very similar resources.

Resources our dietitians like for pregnancy & breastfeeding

There were a few outliers. I'll include those towards the end as well. So, without further ado, here are some of the resources my colleagues and I have found useful. So, number one, for pregnancy and breastfeeding, I highly recommend Registered Dietitian, Lily Nichols and all of her books on real food nutrition.

And she also keeps some writing on a blog of hers, and she's got a great social media presence. Lily, I think, really gives a wonderful blend of thorough research, traditional wisdom and combining all of that then with the modern mama's perspective. I've quoted her work a lot on Dishing Up Nutrition and on blog posts that I've written.

It's one of the first people that I remember making it a point to plan and prepare for those early postpartum phases of life, which that's, that's the part that's often overlooked by the excitement and just the visibility of the pregnancy stage. And Lily has 3 books. Her most recent one takes it a step further and she looks at Real Food for Fertility, but she's got 2 other really great books, one called Real Food for Pregnancy, and actually her very first book first one was Real Food for Gestational Diabetes.

So she's got some really great resources there. She does share some practical things here and there about feeding children. She does that every now and again, she does have two children of her own, but her primary expertise is in pregnancy and postpartum nutrition. So you can check out her stuff at lilynicholsrdn.com.

Another resource that we really love for breastfeeding and almost everything motherhood in that first year postpartum, I learned a lot from Karrie Locher, who is a postpartum and neonatal nurse, and she's also a certified lactation specialist.

She has a blog, but also has a really great social media presence. She puts out a ton of educational content, and I think she has it really well organized. So, when you're in that postpartum fog in those first couple of weeks or first few months, you can search exactly what you need and what you're interested in and you can find it pretty easily.

She does have five kids of her own, so she's been around the block a few times with pregnancy and postpartum and nursing. I don't think I knew about her with my first postpartum experience, but I definitely did for my second, and I found a lot of her information to be very, very helpful. I also really felt like I loved her very compassionate and empathetic approach to things like I always felt like she was that person in my corner saying, like, yes, this phase might be hard. There are challenges to it and you can do it.

She has some really great content on social media, but she has also put together a lot of online courses and some guides that takes you through the nuts and bolts of baby care and breastfeeding. So those are on her website. So I definitely 10 out of 10 would recommend Karrie Locher. And, and I should say Karrie Locher, her first name is spelled K A R R I E and locker is spelled L O C H E R. So it doesn't, it's not exactly like your gym locker at school.

On a similar note, just kind of branching off on that a little bit, I will say If you are a mom who's pregnant, or thinking about breastfeeding, or like you think your plan and your desire is to breastfeed, I would do research during pregnancy or early on and just establish contact with a lactation consultant or a clinic of some kind for breastfeeding support.

You might not need it, but it is worth its weight in gold if you do need it. I used a lactation consultant more with my first baby just because hello, new mom. I had no idea what I was doing. And then I still checked in with somebody once or twice with my second baby, even though things clicked a little bit more smoothly with her. So that would be, I'd say, a great resource to especially have in your pocket going into labor and delivery or those early couple of weeks postpartum. It's harder when you're trying to make up ground along the way.

So before I continue on, I'm going to take a quick pause here. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, I'll share more resources that we as dietitians and moms turn to for pregnancy, breastfeeding, and feeding our own kids. We'll be right back.

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Resource recommendations regarding feeding babies & kids

Welcome back. So I'm going to continue on that train we talked a little bit about during pregnancy and postpartum. So I'm going to move on to a couple of things regarding feeding babies and little kids. So when it comes to introducing solid foods to young babies, this usually starts to happen around I know I got some great information from a variety of sources. So, Nutritional Weight & Wellness has a great blog article that I referred to a lot. It was written in 2016, but it's called An Age-by-Age Guide for the First 12 Months. So that has some really great real food ideas there.

I also use Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Childcare. So that one's, it's not all nutrition related, but it does cover feeding babies and feeding kids. I also used an app called Solid Starts. In this app, you can look up so many different kinds of foods and the app will show you and give you ideas on how to safely prepare that food for babies and toddlers at their different stages of development.

They have some really awesome visuals, which I found really helpful. And like any app, there's a free version, which I personally thought was plenty helpful, but then you can pay a small monthly fee to get access to more in depth features. And that app is run by a team of feeding specialists with more letters behind their names than you can shake a stick at.

So check that one out if you're just looking for ideas or if you're kind of getting to that stage of introducing foods to babies and young kids. And then when it comes to feeding kids in general, I do want to mention that Nutritional Weight & Wellness has put out some great content over the years on various aspects of feeding kids.

Usually we have a lot of great, snack ideas, lunch ideas, just some great balanced meal ideas just to get the ball rolling and get you thinking about real food for your kids. But we also like the content from a few accounts. There's one called Kids Eat in Color. And there's another one called Feeding Littles.

They both have blogs, they both have social media accounts. The content here ranges from ideas on what to feed your kids for snacks to help prevent the hangries from happening, ideas on what to pack for lunches for school or daycare, ideas on how to navigate that delicate conversation, especially as your kids get older, get exposed to more things in school or via media and stuff like that.

They give ideas on how to navigate that delicate conversation regarding body weight and body image, food neutrality, and just trying to help kids set up a good relationship with food and nourishing themselves. Some of their content addresses like public policy around like food access, government subsidized meal programs and more, but both of those accounts, Kids Eat in Color and Feeding Littles, they're both run by moms who are registered dietitians and they have great supportive teams of specialists around them as well.

So like the Karrie Locher account, I thought these voices were, they're just so helpful and they do a great job that you can kind of see the messiness around real life motherhood, feeding our kids, and I think they do a really good job of just conveying that there's a lot of other moms in the trenches with us doing that dirty work day in and day out and that we're all always operating on the best level that we can at any given time.

So it's just it's really nice I think validation to see, like, if you're doing well, that's great. But even if you're struggling, that's okay too, because it happens to all of us.

And then I'm going to wrap up just with a few honorable mentions. So in no particular order, I'm just going to throw these in here that were mentioned by some of my colleagues. So there's a book by Nina Planck, called Real Food for Mother and Baby. Planck is spelled P L A N C K.

There is another mom and pediatric registered dietitian named Jill Castle who's out there. We actually interviewed her on Dishing Up Nutrition several years ago now about picky eating for kids. She has her own website, which is jillcastle.com and she has a podcast called The Nourished Child. So she has some really great in depth information there.

And last but not least, I wanted to mention the Ellen Satter Institute. So Ellyn, spelled E L L Y N, and Satter, S A T T E R. This place provides a framework and philosophy for feeding kids and teens and improving relationships with food.

And like I said, I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I know there is one tenant that is taught here that I've always tried to adhere to, or kind of keep in mind when I'm feeding my kiddos. It's called the division of responsibility when it comes to meal time.

And so what that looks like is parents and caregivers decide what and when meals and snacks are offered. It's the kid's job to decide if they're going to eat it and how much they're going to eat. Everyone has a different role and a different job when it comes to a meal time.

Some of that can take the pressure that we feel as parents of if our child chooses not to eat or if they only eat very selective things or like how much they're eating like I think for me it was helpful to just kind of frame that there's only so much that I can do at a meal time or a snack time. I can offer the best food that I can at any given time and then the rest of it is kind of up to my kiddos as to what they're going to do with it.

Hopefully some of those resources or maybe all of them were helpful for this particular mom and maybe even other moms out here in our community, other parents and even other grandparents or like the cool aunts and uncles out there that just have cool little people in their lives and you're just looking for some ideas on how to level up some of your feeding or mealtimes and snack times with kids.

I want to thank you all so much for listening to Dishing Up Nutrition's “Ask a Nutritionist”. And if you found this episode helpful, again, be sure to leave us a rating or review on your podcast app. And if you have a question that you would like us to answer, we have two options for you. You can join our private Dishing Up Nutrition Facebook community by searching Dishing Up Nutrition on Facebook.

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