The Micronutrients Series - Macro Minerals Pt2 Fertility and the first 1,000 days

**COMPETITION TIME** - listen to the first 10 minutes of the episode to hear about the competition in more detail - or head straight to this link to enter! 
00:00
Hello, you are listening to Katy Bradbury nutritional therapist and registered nurse. Today's podcast episode is called The Micronutrients Series, Macro Minerals, Part 2.
 
00:15
So hello, and welcome to this week's episode, I really hope that you're doing well, I can't believe that we are now in September already. And I don't know about you, but it really feels like the season is changing already. I'm really noticing here in the UK anyway that the nights are starting to draw around now. We've seen a shift in the weather and you know, it's broken, finally. The drought has lifted a bit and we've seen some rain over the last week or so. So it really feels like there's quite a lot of change on the cards at the moment. So I'm feeling quite excited about that actually.
 
01:14
I'm continuing the episode today with the Micronutrient Series. So if you're a regular listener, then you will know that over the last few weeks with one or two things, intermittently, punctuating it, I've been doing a Mini series or not, not so mini series because there's a lot to cover on micronutrients. So I've covered the different vitamins so far from the fat soluble vitamins to the water soluble vitamins. And now I'm gradually working my way through the minerals. So i've been starting with what we call the macro minerals because there are four minerals that are just of upmost importance for the body when it comes to maintaining homeostasis and really needing to have tight levels, serum levels in the bloodstream of those vitamins so that so that we can stay alive actually so and we measure the macro. The reason I'm referring to them as the macro minerals is because we refer, we measure them in milligrammes or sometimes even grammes rather than micrograms. So we thought that those four would be a good place to start. Now, last week, I covered actually it wasn't last week, which I'll cut I'll come back to in just a moment. But last episode, I covered magnesium. Today, I am going to talk about calcium. And in the next episode, I will talk about the other two together in all likelihood, rather than doing an episode each on potassium, and sodium. So it might not feel like particularly exciting, but actually, feeding your knowledge with information on these micronutrients, and the role that they have to play in the body. Sometimes directly related to fertility and sometimes indirectly related, then it is really important to just help empower you. And to help you understand why some of the principles I talk about are so important. So when I talk about things like the Mediterranean diet, when I talk about things like including a range of, you know, multicoloured, eating the rainbow, and all the different range of plant foods and eating enough protein, and all of these kinds of things i'm not just telling you those things for the fun of it. Part of that is because of the macronutrient content. And part of it is because eating a nutrient dense diet, like the covering the principles that I've just mentioned, will enable your body to get enough of the micronutrients that it's so needs in order to improve your fertility and make a baby ultimately.
 
04:13
So I wanted to before I actually get started on talking to you about calcium today, because I've got a few things that I wanted to share with you on calcium. I did just want to cover what I touched on very briefly there, which was that I didn't do an episode last week. And indeed, if you are a regular listener, you might have noticed that over the summer. These episodes have been a little bit sparse. They've been a little bit few and far between. Now, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you about this because, you know hopefully, if you have been listening for a little while then we've got to know each other and you know, you know that