Pregnancy Nutrition- According to Chinese Medicine
I have worked with A LOT of pregnant folks. Some have been my patients during only their pregnancies, but many were my fertility patients first.
And, when I have people who have struggled to conceive for a while, I often find that there is a tendency for more anxiety to show itself during the pregnancy. Nerves around ultrasounds, but wanting more checkups. Wanting to take the right prenatal. Staying away from certain foods, worrying about beauty products. There’s worry that they aren’t doing enough, they shouldn’t be doing certain things, and they are messing up the entire pregnancy. And one of the most confusing places I counsel my people through is dietary advice and nutritional guidelines.
A lot of people hear that I am an acupuncturist and assume that my work only encompasses using acupuncture needles! But, acupuncture is a small column under a larger umbrella of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Traditional Chinese Medicine includes acupuncture, moxibustion (one of my favorite tools in my toolbelt), herbal remedies, and dietary advice. I love reminding my people that acupuncture and Chinese Medicine are a complete health system, not a fragmented or random support. Chinese people have been using this system for thousands of years. And the good news with that is that we have a lot of experience based evidence and clinical knowledge to fall back on.
But, I love pulling in some western science research in addition to Chinese Medicine recommendations to round out these guidelines to my patients and give them tangible goals. I find that the work of Lily Nichols’ (Real Food for Pregnancy, Real Food for Fertility, and Real Food for Gestational Diabetes) and Jessie Inchauspé (9 Months that Count Forever, to be released March, 2026) to be some of the most enlightening support and research around pregnancy and nutritional needs. Both are so helpful for navigating nutritional needs of prenatal, pregnancy, and postpartum.
In this brief article I am going to outline some basic tenants of Chinese Medicine and then compare that to Jessie Inchauspé’s work.
Chinese Medicine advocates, at its basic level, whole foods. That stands for anyone. But, in Chinese Medicine, there is a wider array of food and dietary advice that follows when someone is pregnant/postpartum. To really understand, we need to explore the concepts of prenatal jing and postnatal jing.
Prenatal Jing (先天之精) — What You’re Born With
In Chinese medicine, prenatal jing is the essence you inherit at conception.
It comes from both parents, stored in the Kidneys, and it determines:
Constitution
Growth and development
Fertility capacity
Longevity tendencies
Think of prenatal jing as the original blueprint. It cannot be increased after conception—but it can be protected, preserved, and supported.
During pregnancy, the fetus is entirely dependent on the parent’s jing, blood, and qi to express this blueprint. This is why Chinese medicine has always treated pregnancy as a time of conservation, meaning rest and adequate nutrition is a huge facet.
Postnatal Jing (后天之精) — What You Build Daily
Postnatal jing is created after birth from:
Food and drink (Spleen + Stomach function)
Breath (Lung qi)
This is the jing that continually empties and replenishes throughout life.
In pregnancy, postnatal jing becomes the primary buffer protecting the parent’s deeper reserves. Meaning that food choices are essential for protecting prenatal jing from being pulled on to create life and supporting their own body to still function and operate well. During pregnancy you need a whole lot of postnatal jing support. And western research also supports this (more on that later).
Chinese Medicine Nutritional Guidelines
So, how do we support nutrition in Chinese Medicine? Some very general suggestions come from ideas of supporting qi, nourishing blood, calming shen, and tonifying kidney qi. I have often recommended for my patients more red foods like beets, berries, red meats, marrow, eggs, whole grains, seeds, legumes, organ meats, plenty of veggies, and dark leafy greens. This is the same in pregnancy. These recommendations are so general, I hope you see that. That’s because a large part of nutritional recommendations from Chinese Medicine are incredibly personalized. Your Chinese Medicine provider will learn about you, understand your bodies constitution and then make more specific recommendations for you. For the purpose of this substack, it does not benefit us to delve deeply into the nuance. But, whole and nutritionally dense foods reign supreme here.
Western Medicine
So many pregnancy practitioners often recommend that my people just take a prenatal supplement. But, I have yet to hear any of them recommend a certain prenatal or even check if the prenatal my patient is taking supports everything that they need to.
I love Lily Nichols’ sentiment here: A prenatal is an insurance policy. We should be supporting our nutritional needs primarily through food.
I completely agree.
Jessie Inchauspé (9 Months that Count Forever) found that pregnant folks need four key things and they are often deficient in them during pregnancy:
Protein:
Baseline recommendation
~1.2–1.5 g of protein per kg of body weight per day
For most pregnant people, this works out to:
75–100+ grams of protein per day
Often closer to the higher end in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters
This is notably higher than the outdated RDA of ~60 g/day, which she (and many researchers including Lily Nichols) consider insufficient for pregnancy.
From a Chinese medicine lens:
Adequate protein = strong gu qi
Strong gu qi → blood and ying qi
Adequate blood → postnatal jing spared
Protein insufficiency → deeper Kidney draw
So while Jessie uses metabolic language, the function she’s describing is exactly what Chinese medicine has been saying for centuries.
Choline:
So many doctors mention that folate is needed (or the synthetic version of folic acid), but I have heard only one doctor mention choline. Choline is important for:
Fetal brain development
Neural tube formation
Memory and long-term cognitive outcomes
Often missing from standard prenatals, though not all
Primary food sources she discusses:
Eggs (especially yolks)
Liver (cow especially)
Beef
She points out that many pregnant people meet folate goals (often because prenatals have them in it), but fall short on choline. To get adequate amounts of choline, we need to be eating 4 eggs a day if you are pregnant. If you are vegan or vegetarian, that amounts to about 8 pounds of soybeans. In this case, she recommends using a supplement instead. While choline does not exist in Traditional Chinese Medicine, we can analyze what it supports and put it into the framework of our language as practitioners. I would look at this and say is supports the creation of Blood and also something called Marrow, which helps to form the brain in Chinese Medicine.
Omega-3s (especially DHA):
She focuses on DHA for:
Fetal brain and eye development
Placental health
Reducing inflammation
Lowering risk of preterm birth
She emphasizes that intake is often too low unless someone is intentionally eating fatty fish (like salmon) or supplementing. In Chinese Medicine we would liken this to supporting the Liver Blood and clearing heat (which can be likened to calming inflammation and heat could also contribute to preterm birth).
Magnesium
She includes magnesium because of its role in:
Blood sugar regulation
Muscle relaxation (cramping, sleep)
Blood pressure support
Nervous system stability
She frames it as protective for both gestational diabetes risk and maternal stress load. In Chinese Medicine we would like this heavy mineral to calming the shen (which can present with high blood pressure, high stress, and tension).
What Jessie explores is so interesting to me. So much of our nutritional recommendations set the stage for our future child’s health. Decisions before conceiving, during pregnancy, and (I would argue) even the postpartum period can affect our children’s health.
Jessie Inchauspé speaks to this idea if the birthing parent does not have adequate nutrition, they will pull from their own reserves (to a limit) for their developing child. They will use their own protein (muscle mass) to help their child grow. They will use their own magnesium from bone and tissue. This speaks to what I mentioned before- that Prenatal Jing will be pulled on and used as a reserve if there is not enough qi or postnatal Jing to support a pregnancy. In that scenario, everyone loses. The parent loses on reserves and their Jing. The baby does not receive everything they need.
Ultimately both perspectives should show us how important pregnancy nutrition is! And that we need a whole lot more research to help us make sense of nutritional guidelines in tangible ways. Overall, I love seeing these findings from a Western Perspective and considering them from the lens of Chinese Medicine. It helps me to teach my patients more tangibly, but still feel like I am representing my scope of practice well.
Shetty, J. (Host). & Inchauspé, J. (Guest). (2026, February 23). Jessie Inchauspé: 90% of pregnant people are missing THIS nutrient (Follow THIS simple diet to reduce glucose spikes & protect your baby’s brain & metabolism) [Audio podcast episode]. On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Spotify.
Nichols, L., & Hendrickson-Jack, L. (2024). Real food for fertility: Prepare your body for pregnancy with preconception nutrition and fertility awareness. Fertility Food Publishing.
Nichols, L. (2018). Real Food for Pregnancy: The science and wisdom of optimal prenatal nutrition (1st ed.). Little, Brown Spark (self-published).
Nichols, L. (2015). Real Food for Gestational Diabetes: An effective alternative to the conventional nutrition approach. Lily Nichols.
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