Office Hours: Your Pregnancy & Postpartum Questions Answered

Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one on one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, and each week, we're gonna pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live one hundred healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at functionhealth.com/mark and use code mark twenty twenty six to get $50 towards your membership. Once you conceive, the questions don't stop. They just multiply. Pregnancy is a time of profound transformation. Your hormones shift, your metabolism changes, your nutritional needs increase, your nervous system adapts in ways that most women are not really prepared for. And postpartum, well, that may be one of the most misunderstood and underserved stages of a woman's life. So in this office hours, we're slowing things down and answering your most common real work questions about how to support your body during pregnancy and afterwards. We're gonna talk about things like choosing the right prenatal vitamins and understanding the difference between folate and folic acid. We're gonna talk about managing nausea in pregnancy, acne, heartburn, which is common and needs many other common pregnancy discomforts. We're gonna talk about supporting mental health during pregnancy and why it matters for your well-being postpartum. We're gonna talk about reducing the risk of complications in pregnancy like preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure in pregnancy. And we'll talk about nourishing your body in the third trimester to prepare for labor and recovery. And then we're gonna move into postpartum. What happens with your hormonal shifts? Thyroid shifts? What happens in your pelvic floor? How do you heal that? How do you support your immune system? How do you deal with some of the mood changes that happen with all these shifts in hormones? What about hair loss? And how do you recover after a c section? This isn't about doing everything perfectly. It's about understanding what your body is going through and learning how to support it with clarity, with some compassion, and a few evidence based tools. So whether you're pregnant now or you're planning ahead in the postpartum phase or supporting someone you love, my goal is to walk you through a process to walk away feeling informed, to feel empowered, to not feel so alone. So let's talk about what happens once you conceive and how to support your body through pregnancy and postpartum. Alright. Let's start with pregnancy and prenatal vitamins and the whole difference between folate …