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1 | Is Fennel Safe during Pregnancy?
Welcome to episode 1! Today, I discussed whether fennel is safe to use during pregnancy & some of the evidence that informs my opinion. For a list of references, please visit www.intheclinic.com/1
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Transcript
(00:03)
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the first episode of In the Clinic with Camille. As you have no doubt guessed, my name is Camille Freeman. I am a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist specializing in reproductive health.
(00:14)
And the whole point of this podcast is for me to share some of what is going on in my own clinic so that you can benefit as a practitioner or as somebody who's learning how to be a practitioner. Now, the first question I want to answer is whether fennel is safe in pregnancy.
(00:30)
In my opinion and before I answer the question, just a very quick disclaimer, which is that what I'm going to say here is meant to be educational. If you are pregnant, please talk to your health care practitioner about what's appropriate for you. And likewise, if you're working with pregnant clients and you don't have a lot of experience with that, find a mentor, do your own research about your client's specific situation and so forth. So take all this with a grain of salt, essentially.
(00:57)
All right. So let's talk about my opinion here, whether fennel is safe during pregnancy. Before we do that, we need to make sure we're all talking about the same thing. So Foeniculum vulgaris, the scientific name. There's two different ways. It's two different forms that it tends to be used in therapeutically. One is actually the essential oil.
(01:15)
Obviously, this is a highly concentrated extract of just particular ingredients. And then the other way is really the essentially the whole seed, which technically is a fruit. But we're gonna call it a seed because that's how most people refer to it. And you can use the seed either as a food, you could just chew it up. It tastes pretty good or it can be used as a powder. It can be used as an infusion, a warm infusion typically, or an extract, such as a tincture.
(01:45)
So what we're talking about here is the whole seed is using the whole seed therapeutically during pregnancy. Now, generally speaking, fennel seed is considered very, very safe. It's used in many, many different cultures as a culinary spice. It's in a lot of different foods. People eat a fair amount of it this way, not for medicinal use, but just as part of their diets. And it's quite tasty. You know, it's in a lot of things and it tastes good.
(02:18)
It's actually on the GRAS list, generally recognized as safe, which is put out by the FDA. However, this is something I hope we all know.
(02:25)
But I wanna say it again just in case the grass list is specific for food additives, meaning things that are added to foods as spices or preservatives and things like that. So it does the graph list doesn't talk about medicinal use or supplements, things like that. It doesn't refer to that. So just because something is on the grass list does not mean that it's safe to use in therapeutic or medicinal doses.
(02:51)
OK, so in some cases, and probably at the doses that are used in spices and foods and things like that, fennel is probably quite safe. It's it has a long history of use in that context. There's no apparent association with problems and so forth. Some of the things that give me pause more talking about using fennel therapeutically during pregnancy have to do with both the traditional use and some of the studies that have come out in the last, say, ten ish years.
(03:23)
Now we know that fennel has been used for a number of reproductive health concerns. So, for example, there are studies and there's also traditional use supporting its application for things like peri menopausal symptoms. Desmet area, which has pain associated with menstruation, polygamy, Marea, and amenorrhea, which is infrequent or absent menses in somebody who would otherwise be menstruating. And of course, it has a very long history of supporting lactation. And all of these things lead me to think that it has some kind of activity relating to reproductive health and or specific activity on the uterus, maybe associated with painful periods and things like that.
(04:07)
So when I when I see that, especially both in the traditional use and in some of the studies that have been done, I start to think, OK.
(04:17)
It seems likely that in some cases it's affecting reproductive hormones.
(04:21)
Now, a number of these studies are using the essential oil rather than the whole seed. All right. So some of those we can kind of set aside, I don't recommend using a central oil internally during pregnancy. Just to be really clear. That's, in my opinion, off the table. It's just a no. So so you could be like, oh, well, a lot of those are a central oil. That's not the same as the seed.
(04:42)
However, there are some reasonably designed studies using fennel seed.
(04:48)
Both of them actually use infusion that indicate that it's pretty likely that it is affecting hormone levels. So I'll talk you through these these two that I found. Unfortunately, this first one, the abstract only. Available, I was unable to access the full text, so this can be a brief discussion, but here you go. So this was a randomized study and essentially they took 80 women who had Oleg amenorrhea or a minor reha meaning they weren't menstruating as often as they should offend.
(05:19)
And they split them into randomise them into two groups. One of them took an infusion, a pretty high dose. Eleven, just over 11 grams in total of fennel mint meant the longer folia and vertex. And they just took that infusion for the last 10 days of an induced menstrual cycle. And then the other 40 women were randomized to receive a essentially a form of progesterone.
(05:43)
OK.
(05:44)
And they found that both of these interventions induced menstruation. They both induced menses. So they just did that for one cycle. And then they followed up with them. And they found that in the next cycle. So they hadn't been taking the herbal infusion or the progesterone derivative. And they found that in that next cycle, the herbal group was actually more likely to experience a normal on time ministration compared to the prescription group. So that was a 50 percent of the herbal group had a normal menstruation the next time.
(06:16)
And only about 24 percent of the prescription group did. They also found that there was a decrease in dismissed orea acne, her statism, those are all associated with PCOS and also lower Lutin housing hormone and total testosterone and free testosterone in the herbal group.
(06:36)
So that tells us that one of these herbs or the combination of the final vertex and mint was specifically affecting steroid hormone production, not just in that one cycle, but probably over at least the subsequent few cycles as well. Now, we don't know how much of this was found. All the authors indicated that phenyl was the majority IRB in this formula. But we can't specifically attribute this to finish. However, it certainly puts my radar up to hear this.
(07:06)
A second study which just came out last year randomized, I believe it was about 20 people per group and one group had five grams of fennel infused in water. I think it was 200 miles of water daily except during menstruation. And the other group got metformin. So these were all people who had a ligament area associated with PCOS. And the federal group also got dry cupping, uncertain days of the week. I am not an expert and dry cupping, so I'm not going to comment on that.
(07:35)
But they did this actually for six cycles and they found that after six cycles, both the metformin group and the fennel cupping group had a significant improvement in terms of a ligament area. And BMI, it actually took the fennel group longer to normalize the menstrual cycle. But after six months, they were basically in the same place as the metformin people. Both groups had a significant drop in BMI. And the people who were in the final group actually had a significantly greater decrease in decision area are painful ministration symptoms compared to the metformin group.
(08:10)
So, again, we can't specifically say if it was the final or the cupping. But we do have this situation where the final seems to be affecting ministration underlying hormones, possibly lowering androgen levels and so forth. So there is some interaction with the reproductive hormones on some level. Now, the question is, oh, well, neither of these were in people who are pregnant and isn't necessarily bad to take herbs that affect hormones. Sarah. Sex hormones during pregnancy?
(08:43)
Not necessarily. We don't know that one way or the other. We do know that people who are pregnant have extremely high levels of many of the different reproductive hormones, especially progesterone and some of the estrogens, et cetera. So would a small amount of a phyto estrogen be harmful, baby?
(09:00)
Maybe not. We don't really know.
(09:03)
We do know that there's a lot we don't know about pregnancy. We know that maybe it would be a good thing to have some of these ERBs in terms of, OK, well, if we think this IRB might be lowering uterine contractility or increasing uterine receptivity, these may actually increase fertility. They may be helpful in preventing miscarriage and that kind of thing. However, they may not be.
(09:28)
There's a lot we don't know in particular about the initiation of birth towards the end of pregnancy and what needs to happen in order to gear the uterus up, in order to basically get ready for the birth and then to initiate the birth. Is it possible that Fennel could interfere with that? Is it possible that it could spur that along too quickly, etc.? That is what we don't know. Now, is there any evidence in terms of the research about finial in pregnancy?
(09:56)
There's a little bit and it's kind of indirect. So I'll tell you what I found. There was one observation. Study, which means that it means it wasn't an intervention. They were just asking people what they were doing. They weren't asking them to change anything. But they interviewed a whole bunch of pregnant women in Italy and they found that people who reported taking Finial daily are close to daily throughout their pregnancies actually had a shorter gestation than those who did not take the fiddle.
(10:24)
It was a pretty small difference. It was thirty eight point eight weeks versus or nine point one weeks. But it was it was significant. The P value is less than point of five. And when we think about pregnancy, those last few days are actually really important. There's still things happening at the end of pregnancy.
(10:41)
A lot of a lot of times you'll hear people being like, oh, you can get induced to 38 weeks. It's no big deal. But most babies are still not fully cooked by that time. So those last few days can be really important. So it's I think it's important to know that, OK, there is some kind of association. Now, does that mean Fennel caused a shorter gestation? Absolutely not. We don't know about causality because the fiddle could've been taking the finial because they had some problem that did cause the shorter gestation.
(11:10)
So it's really just a an observation, but not necessarily something that we need to place all of our eggs in this particular basket. There have been other studies, again, observational studies finding that people who used Vinnell regularly during pregnancy did not have an increased risk of preterm birth or any kind of other adverse events.
(11:31)
So it's hard to say, but it's enough to at least be like, ha! OK, that's interesting. So when we take all of this together, what what do we come up with about whether fennel is safe during pregnancy? This is my opinion. And again, you can see how different people might form different opinions based on what we know. My opinion is that small doses that we might see used as a spice in a food or a flavoring in an herbal tea.
(11:57)
So just a little bit of fennel, like a Graham, for example, is probably very safe in pregnancy. I don't see any reason to avoid fennel as an additive in your food or if there's a, you know, some kind of product that has fennel in it. That's a food product. I don't think there's a good reason to avoid fennel when we start to look at higher doses in particular over longer periods of time. So for me, that would be like three grams a day or more.
(12:25)
I don't consider fennel one of these herbs that we can just take freely in pregnancy with no second thoughts.
(12:31)
There are times where fennel may be reasonable to consider, but we need to look at the alternatives. Are there other herbs that you could consider first? Are there other interventions you could try first and then?
(12:43)
So basically you're asking yourself fennel versus what? All right. I don't recommend that Fennel be taking as a tonic. Just added to your fennel tea. I don't recommend that people take fennel. A lot of times it's in many of these, like healthy milk, breastfeeding type of formulas. And sometimes people want to start those at the end of pregnancy with the idea that they may gear up their milk supply. I don't think that's a good idea. I would not do that for a variety of reasons, not just this one.
(13:10)
So in my opinion, Fennel is a maybe under certain circumstances. OK, in pregnancy IRB, but generally speaking, it's not a go to it's not one that I recommend taking without a lot of serious thought and without a very specific reason. So I hope that makes sense to you if you have a differing opinion. I would love to hear about it. If you go to my website, Camille Freeman. Com backslash in the clinic, you can find all the references for this.
(13:39)
And there's also commenting area associated with this episode.
(13:43)
Also, if you have any request for future podcasts, episodes, topics you'd like to hear discussed. I would love to hear about them. Please email me or get in touch through my website. Camille Frieman dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next time.
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the first episode of In the Clinic with Camille. As you have no doubt guessed, my name is Camille Freeman. I am a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist specializing in reproductive health.
(00:14)
And the whole point of this podcast is for me to share some of what is going on in my own clinic so that you can benefit as a practitioner or as somebody who's learning how to be a practitioner. Now, the first question I want to answer is whether fennel is safe in pregnancy.
(00:30)
In my opinion and before I answer the question, just a very quick disclaimer, which is that what I'm going to say here is meant to be educational. If you are pregnant, please talk to your health care practitioner about what's appropriate for you. And likewise, if you're working with pregnant clients and you don't have a lot of experience with that, find a mentor, do your own research about your client's specific situation and so forth. So take all this with a grain of salt, essentially.
(00:57)
All right. So let's talk about my opinion here, whether fennel is safe during pregnancy. Before we do that, we need to make sure we're all talking about the same thing. So Foeniculum vulgaris, the scientific name. There's two different ways. It's two different forms that it tends to be used in therapeutically. One is actually the essential oil.
(01:15)
Obviously, this is a highly concentrated extract of just particular ingredients. And then the other way is really the essentially the whole seed, which technically is a fruit. But we're gonna call it a seed because that's how most people refer to it. And you can use the seed either as a food, you could just chew it up. It tastes pretty good or it can be used as a powder. It can be used as an infusion, a warm infusion typically, or an extract, such as a tincture.
(01:45)
So what we're talking about here is the whole seed is using the whole seed therapeutically during pregnancy. Now, generally speaking, fennel seed is considered very, very safe. It's used in many, many different cultures as a culinary spice. It's in a lot of different foods. People eat a fair amount of it this way, not for medicinal use, but just as part of their diets. And it's quite tasty. You know, it's in a lot of things and it tastes good.
(02:18)
It's actually on the GRAS list, generally recognized as safe, which is put out by the FDA. However, this is something I hope we all know.
(02:25)
But I wanna say it again just in case the grass list is specific for food additives, meaning things that are added to foods as spices or preservatives and things like that. So it does the graph list doesn't talk about medicinal use or supplements, things like that. It doesn't refer to that. So just because something is on the grass list does not mean that it's safe to use in therapeutic or medicinal doses.
(02:51)
OK, so in some cases, and probably at the doses that are used in spices and foods and things like that, fennel is probably quite safe. It's it has a long history of use in that context. There's no apparent association with problems and so forth. Some of the things that give me pause more talking about using fennel therapeutically during pregnancy have to do with both the traditional use and some of the studies that have come out in the last, say, ten ish years.
(03:23)
Now we know that fennel has been used for a number of reproductive health concerns. So, for example, there are studies and there's also traditional use supporting its application for things like peri menopausal symptoms. Desmet area, which has pain associated with menstruation, polygamy, Marea, and amenorrhea, which is infrequent or absent menses in somebody who would otherwise be menstruating. And of course, it has a very long history of supporting lactation. And all of these things lead me to think that it has some kind of activity relating to reproductive health and or specific activity on the uterus, maybe associated with painful periods and things like that.
(04:07)
So when I when I see that, especially both in the traditional use and in some of the studies that have been done, I start to think, OK.
(04:17)
It seems likely that in some cases it's affecting reproductive hormones.
(04:21)
Now, a number of these studies are using the essential oil rather than the whole seed. All right. So some of those we can kind of set aside, I don't recommend using a central oil internally during pregnancy. Just to be really clear. That's, in my opinion, off the table. It's just a no. So so you could be like, oh, well, a lot of those are a central oil. That's not the same as the seed.
(04:42)
However, there are some reasonably designed studies using fennel seed.
(04:48)
Both of them actually use infusion that indicate that it's pretty likely that it is affecting hormone levels. So I'll talk you through these these two that I found. Unfortunately, this first one, the abstract only. Available, I was unable to access the full text, so this can be a brief discussion, but here you go. So this was a randomized study and essentially they took 80 women who had Oleg amenorrhea or a minor reha meaning they weren't menstruating as often as they should offend.
(05:19)
And they split them into randomise them into two groups. One of them took an infusion, a pretty high dose. Eleven, just over 11 grams in total of fennel mint meant the longer folia and vertex. And they just took that infusion for the last 10 days of an induced menstrual cycle. And then the other 40 women were randomized to receive a essentially a form of progesterone.
(05:43)
OK.
(05:44)
And they found that both of these interventions induced menstruation. They both induced menses. So they just did that for one cycle. And then they followed up with them. And they found that in the next cycle. So they hadn't been taking the herbal infusion or the progesterone derivative. And they found that in that next cycle, the herbal group was actually more likely to experience a normal on time ministration compared to the prescription group. So that was a 50 percent of the herbal group had a normal menstruation the next time.
(06:16)
And only about 24 percent of the prescription group did. They also found that there was a decrease in dismissed orea acne, her statism, those are all associated with PCOS and also lower Lutin housing hormone and total testosterone and free testosterone in the herbal group.
(06:36)
So that tells us that one of these herbs or the combination of the final vertex and mint was specifically affecting steroid hormone production, not just in that one cycle, but probably over at least the subsequent few cycles as well. Now, we don't know how much of this was found. All the authors indicated that phenyl was the majority IRB in this formula. But we can't specifically attribute this to finish. However, it certainly puts my radar up to hear this.
(07:06)
A second study which just came out last year randomized, I believe it was about 20 people per group and one group had five grams of fennel infused in water. I think it was 200 miles of water daily except during menstruation. And the other group got metformin. So these were all people who had a ligament area associated with PCOS. And the federal group also got dry cupping, uncertain days of the week. I am not an expert and dry cupping, so I'm not going to comment on that.
(07:35)
But they did this actually for six cycles and they found that after six cycles, both the metformin group and the fennel cupping group had a significant improvement in terms of a ligament area. And BMI, it actually took the fennel group longer to normalize the menstrual cycle. But after six months, they were basically in the same place as the metformin people. Both groups had a significant drop in BMI. And the people who were in the final group actually had a significantly greater decrease in decision area are painful ministration symptoms compared to the metformin group.
(08:10)
So, again, we can't specifically say if it was the final or the cupping. But we do have this situation where the final seems to be affecting ministration underlying hormones, possibly lowering androgen levels and so forth. So there is some interaction with the reproductive hormones on some level. Now, the question is, oh, well, neither of these were in people who are pregnant and isn't necessarily bad to take herbs that affect hormones. Sarah. Sex hormones during pregnancy?
(08:43)
Not necessarily. We don't know that one way or the other. We do know that people who are pregnant have extremely high levels of many of the different reproductive hormones, especially progesterone and some of the estrogens, et cetera. So would a small amount of a phyto estrogen be harmful, baby?
(09:00)
Maybe not. We don't really know.
(09:03)
We do know that there's a lot we don't know about pregnancy. We know that maybe it would be a good thing to have some of these ERBs in terms of, OK, well, if we think this IRB might be lowering uterine contractility or increasing uterine receptivity, these may actually increase fertility. They may be helpful in preventing miscarriage and that kind of thing. However, they may not be.
(09:28)
There's a lot we don't know in particular about the initiation of birth towards the end of pregnancy and what needs to happen in order to gear the uterus up, in order to basically get ready for the birth and then to initiate the birth. Is it possible that Fennel could interfere with that? Is it possible that it could spur that along too quickly, etc.? That is what we don't know. Now, is there any evidence in terms of the research about finial in pregnancy?
(09:56)
There's a little bit and it's kind of indirect. So I'll tell you what I found. There was one observation. Study, which means that it means it wasn't an intervention. They were just asking people what they were doing. They weren't asking them to change anything. But they interviewed a whole bunch of pregnant women in Italy and they found that people who reported taking Finial daily are close to daily throughout their pregnancies actually had a shorter gestation than those who did not take the fiddle.
(10:24)
It was a pretty small difference. It was thirty eight point eight weeks versus or nine point one weeks. But it was it was significant. The P value is less than point of five. And when we think about pregnancy, those last few days are actually really important. There's still things happening at the end of pregnancy.
(10:41)
A lot of a lot of times you'll hear people being like, oh, you can get induced to 38 weeks. It's no big deal. But most babies are still not fully cooked by that time. So those last few days can be really important. So it's I think it's important to know that, OK, there is some kind of association. Now, does that mean Fennel caused a shorter gestation? Absolutely not. We don't know about causality because the fiddle could've been taking the finial because they had some problem that did cause the shorter gestation.
(11:10)
So it's really just a an observation, but not necessarily something that we need to place all of our eggs in this particular basket. There have been other studies, again, observational studies finding that people who used Vinnell regularly during pregnancy did not have an increased risk of preterm birth or any kind of other adverse events.
(11:31)
So it's hard to say, but it's enough to at least be like, ha! OK, that's interesting. So when we take all of this together, what what do we come up with about whether fennel is safe during pregnancy? This is my opinion. And again, you can see how different people might form different opinions based on what we know. My opinion is that small doses that we might see used as a spice in a food or a flavoring in an herbal tea.
(11:57)
So just a little bit of fennel, like a Graham, for example, is probably very safe in pregnancy. I don't see any reason to avoid fennel as an additive in your food or if there's a, you know, some kind of product that has fennel in it. That's a food product. I don't think there's a good reason to avoid fennel when we start to look at higher doses in particular over longer periods of time. So for me, that would be like three grams a day or more.
(12:25)
I don't consider fennel one of these herbs that we can just take freely in pregnancy with no second thoughts.
(12:31)
There are times where fennel may be reasonable to consider, but we need to look at the alternatives. Are there other herbs that you could consider first? Are there other interventions you could try first and then?
(12:43)
So basically you're asking yourself fennel versus what? All right. I don't recommend that Fennel be taking as a tonic. Just added to your fennel tea. I don't recommend that people take fennel. A lot of times it's in many of these, like healthy milk, breastfeeding type of formulas. And sometimes people want to start those at the end of pregnancy with the idea that they may gear up their milk supply. I don't think that's a good idea. I would not do that for a variety of reasons, not just this one.
(13:10)
So in my opinion, Fennel is a maybe under certain circumstances. OK, in pregnancy IRB, but generally speaking, it's not a go to it's not one that I recommend taking without a lot of serious thought and without a very specific reason. So I hope that makes sense to you if you have a differing opinion. I would love to hear about it. If you go to my website, Camille Freeman. Com backslash in the clinic, you can find all the references for this.
(13:39)
And there's also commenting area associated with this episode.
(13:43)
Also, if you have any request for future podcasts, episodes, topics you'd like to hear discussed. I would love to hear about them. Please email me or get in touch through my website. Camille Frieman dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next time.
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