Nutritional expert Dr. Carolyn Dean talks about how you can apply green living to protect your unborn child and have a smooth delivery and a healthy child.

Having a baby in this toxic world of ours is especially challenging. There is a way to ensure your baby's health and your own health without having to hug trees or live on a remote farm.

Green living means living an eco friendly way of life. Green living is the decision and action to live a responsible lifestyle that minimizes one’s negative impact on the environment. It includes making safe, healthy, and beneficial choices to protect our planet from destruction. Through wiser every day choices, we can live green and ensure our baby's health and improve the quality of life for all of us.

Here are 10 things you need to know to help you and your baby live green and live healthy.

1. Today’s diet of highly processed foods due to ungreen living does not give you the nutrients and minerals you and your baby need to defend against the physical and emotional stress of pregnancy.

2. The anti-stress mineral that is key to prenatal care is magnesium. Yet due to the depletion of this mineral in our soils and in our processed foods – most pregnant mothers do not get their RDA of magnesium and are deficient in this mineral.

3. Avoid processed foods and cut cravings and impulsive eating associated with pregnancy – by increasing your consumption of magnesium rich foods that are organically grown. These would be green vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes and unprocessed grains. This not only supports eco friendly farming but gives you the nutrients you need that are missing from most prenatal care programs.

4. Pesticides, chlorine and fluoride in our water not only pose a general a health threat, but also leech magnesium out of our bodies causing a further deficiency.

5. Drink filtered water or bottled water that has been proven to be free of fluoride and chlorine.

6. Magnesium is a necessary assist in labor and delivery. Old time midwives used to advise all their patients to take "the salts"; they were magnesium salts.

7. Magnesium is the treatment of choice for eclampsia of pregnancy with symptoms of hypertension, edema, and seizures. Magnesium can prevent these symptoms if used during the pregnancy.

8. Many researchers suggest that pregnant mothers routinely take magnesium throughout pregnancy to prevent complications during delivery and postpartum, and to help prevent premature births.1

9. Clinical trials have demonstrated that mothers supplementing with magnesium oxide have larger, healthier babies and lower rates of preeclampsia, premature labor, sudden infant death, and birth defects, including cerebral palsy.2

10. Magnesium oxide is only 4% absorbed but it's laxative effect can be helpful for the constipating effects of pregnancy. A more absorbable form is a magnesium citrate chloride powder formulation that is taken with hot or cold water. Use only supplements that are manufactured by eco-friendly processes and that are food based and organic.

References: 1. Almonte RA et al., “Gestational magnesium de?ciency is deleterious to fetal outcome.” Biol Neonate, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 26–32, 1999. 2. Seelig MS, “Toxemias of pregnancy, postpartum cardiomyopathy and SIDS in consequences of magnesium de?ciency on the enhance- ment of stress reactions; preventive and therapeutic implications: a review.” J Am Coll Nutr, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 429–446, 1994.