Dr. Barry Sears is the best-selling author on Zone nutrition and cooking. Now he's written a textbook: Metabolic Syndrome and Complication in Pregnancy.
Dr. Sears is best known for writing popular books on nutrition, popular in that more than six million copies have been sold in the United States and three of them were New York Times best-sellers, including the #1 best-seller The Zone and one of the best-selling cookbooks of all-time Zone Perfect Meals. So it should not be too much of a surprise that Dr. Sears’ first textbook, Metabolic Syndrome and Complication in Pregnancy, has recently been published. Actually, Dr. Sears is the co-editor of this textbook with Dr. Enrico Ferrazzi, who is a professor and chairman of the Department of Women, Mother, and Neonate at the University of Milan Medical School.
The book is a result of their joint discussions over the years about how to improve fetal health during pregnancy.
As you can see from the cover, the book is not flashy. That’s why it is unlikely to show up at your local bookstore (although you can get it on Amazon.com).
This book contains such exciting-sounding chapters as The Role of Placental Inflammasomes in Linking the Adverse Effects of Maternal Obesity on Fetal Development as well Maternal Diet, Developmental Origins and the Intergenerational Transmission of Cardiometabolic Risk. Obviously, this book is not geared to the general public; however, in the opening chapter Dr. Sears describes the role of inflammation in metabolic syndrome that sets the theme for the rest of the book. That chapter is germane for anyone struggling with metabolic syndrome (that means anyone with obesity, pre-diabetes, and diabetes) because it describes why everything you have been told about metabolic syndrome is probably wrong.
Although the content of these chapters is geared for those in academic medicine as opposed to those who watch Dr. Oz, for an educated person looking for the best possible outcome in pregnancy, the book is important because it also contains the necessary practical diet advice to tip the scale in favor of the unborn child, especially the chapter written by Dr. Sears on anti-inflammatory diets.