Foods Making Preeclampsia Worse: What the Brewer Diet Warns Against (And Why It Flipped the Script)

If you’ve been digging into the Dr. Brewer treatment approach, you already know it’s built on a radical idea: preeclampsia isn’t random, and your kitchen might be your most powerful tool. But while the Brewer pregnancy diet is famous for what it tells you to eat, a lot of protein, full-fat dairy, salt to taste, it’s equally clear about what can make things worse. And the list isn’t the usual “avoid soft cheese and sushi” reminders.

Brewer was obsessed with blood volume. He believed that the root cause of preeclampsia is hypovolemia, dangerously low blood volume triggered by not eating enough of the right things. So in his framework, a food that “makes preeclampsia worse” isn’t necessarily toxic. It’s anything that shrinks your blood volume further, starves your liver of what it needs to make albumin, or steals valuable stomach space from the nutrient-dense foods your expanding circulatory system is screaming for.

I remember reading this list for the first time and feeling my eyebrows climb. Some of it made instant sense. Some of it made me argue with the screen. But after living through a high-risk pregnancy myself, and after years of developing recipes reviewed by a registered dietitian, I’ve come to see the logic underneath even the most counterintuitive entries. Let’s walk through the five big categories of foods and habits that can actively worsen preeclampsia, Brewer-style, and what to eat instead.

1. Diuretic Foods, Teas, and Herbs (The Volume Shrinkers)

When your rings stop fitting and your ankles disappear, the standard folk advice is often to flush it out, drink dandelion tea, eat more celery, maybe try a “cleansing” herbal blend. Brewer would have called this a disaster in the making. Anything that tricks your kidneys into dumping water also shrinks your blood volume, which is exactly what a preeclamptic cascade doesn’t need.

Under the Brewer framework, natural diuretics like heavy amounts of celery, asparagus, cucumber, watercress, and parsley, along with herbal teas containing nettle, dandelion, alfalfa, or cleavers, actively work against your body’s effort to hold onto fluid. Even high doses of caffeine from coffee or energy drinks add a vascular-constricting, diuretic punch. If your blood is already thick, dehydrated, and struggling to perfuse your placenta, the last thing you want to do is make it thicker. I’ve covered the full list of off-limits herbs and ingredients in more detail in my post on the 5 foods to avoid while pregnant, so give that a read if you’re clearing out your tea cabinet.

2. Low-Sodium and Salt-Restricted Products

This is the hill Brewer died on, and it’s still controversial today. Standard prenatal advice often tells women with rising blood pressure to cut salt. Brewer said the opposite: deliberate salt restriction directly worsens the problem. Sodium is the chemical anchor that creates osmotic pressure, the force that locks fluid inside your blood vessels. When you switch to low-sodium canned soups, unsalted crackers, and bland diet foods, you lose your body’s ability to pull fluid out of swollen tissues and back into circulation. Blood volume drops further, the placenta starves more, and your body spikes blood pressure defensively.

I know how scary this sounds when every message you’ve ever heard says “salt is bad.” But Brewer wasn’t talking about processed junk loaded with salt and preservatives. He was talking about salting real, whole foods, your eggs, your roasted vegetables, your soup made from scratch. If you’re trying to reduce preeclampsia naturally, learning to stop fearing the salt shaker on whole food can be a surprisingly freeing shift.

3. Low-Calorie, “Light,” and Restrictive Diet Foods

Many women, terrified of being scolded for weight gain, reach for skim milk, rice cakes, low-fat yogurt, and lean frozen meals. In the Brewer model, this kind of calorie restriction is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If you dip below the 2,300 to 2,600 calorie target, your body enters a minor starvation state. It starts harvesting the protein you eat and burning it as cheap fuel for basic survival, rather than sending those precious amino acids to your liver to make albumin. The result? You’re eating protein, but none of it is actually reaching your blood volume. Your energy levels on Brewer’s diet crash at the same time, because you’re running on fumes while your body cannibalizes its own building blocks.

Think of it this way: low-calorie eating cancels out your protein intake. You’re doing the work of eating eggs and meat and yogurt, but your body is using them for gas instead of construction. That’s a losing trade when you’re trying to help baby grow in womb and build a whole extra circulatory system at the same time.

4. Refined Sugars and High-Glycemic Carbohydrates

Sodas, white bread, pastries, boxed sweets. Brewer warned against these on two fronts. First, they’re nutritional displacement: they fill you up with empty calories, leaving no stomach real estate for the eggs, milk, greens, and whole grains you’re supposed to be eating in large quantities. Second, they create metabolic chaos. Massive blood sugar spikes trigger insulin surges, and chronic insulin spikes inflame and weaken the endothelium, the delicate inner lining of your blood vessels. Since preeclampsia is fundamentally a condition of blood vessel inflammation and oxidative stress, a high-sugar diet is essentially pouring gasoline on a fire.

If you’re looking for a breakfast that won’t spike your blood sugar and leave you shaking by 10 a.m., a couple of eggs with whole-grain toast and butter is miles better than a low-fat muffin and a sugary latte. I’ve written about why a protein-forward meal is the ideal first thing to eat in morning, especially if you’re trying to keep your blood pressure stable.

5. Unbalanced, Isolated Protein Powders

It’s tempting, when you’re staring down the barrel of 80 to 120 grams of protein a day, to just chug a whey or soy protein shake and call it done. Brewer explicitly warned against this. Isolated protein powders lack the natural fats, fat-soluble vitamins, and complex carbohydrate cofactors that come bound to protein in whole foods like eggs, whole milk, and meat. Without those co-nutrients, your liver can’t properly synthesize albumin, and your kidneys can end up strained processing a flood of stripped-down amino acids.

Whole food is the point. Something as simple as a hard-boiled egg, which people constantly ask me about, is boiled egg good for pregnancy? is a perfect little package of protein, choline, and healthy fats that arrives exactly as your body knows how to use it. You can batch a dozen on Sunday and have grab-and-go nutrition all week, no blender required.

How Standard Advice Can Backfire: A Side-by-Side Look

To really understand why these foods make preeclampsia worse in the Brewer model, it helps to see how the conventional advice often pointed in the opposite direction. Here’s the clash:

• Swelling? Standard advice often suggested diuretic teas or cutting salt. Brewer said that shrinks blood volume further, making the arteries clamp down harder and spiking blood pressure higher.
• Rising blood pressure? Standard advice often included calorie restriction and low-sodium diet foods. Brewer said that starves the liver of the fuel and sodium it needs to expand blood volume, pushing the placenta into deeper distress.
• Sudden weight gain? Standard advice often recommended cutting calories and switching to skim dairy and lean proteins. Brewer said that weight gain is a sign your body is trying to expand blood volume, and skimping on calories or fat sabotages the process.
• Protein in urine? Standard care often read it as kidney damage and prepared for early delivery. Brewer read it as systemic protein starvation and deployed the emergency protocol of hourly eggs and milk.

I’m not here to tell you which model is “right” for your body, that’s between you and your provider. But I am here to tell you that understanding the logic behind Brewer’s avoidances gave me a completely different lens on what was happening inside my own body during a high-risk pregnancy. It made me stop seeing food as a source of anxiety and start seeing it as the literal infrastructure for my baby’s survival.

What to Eat Instead (A Practical Reset)

If the foods above make preeclampsia worse, the antidote is straightforward. Fill your plate with the things that actively support blood volume expansion and vascular health:

• Protein at every meal: Eggs, whole-milk Greek yogurt, chicken thighs, ground beef, wild salmon, lentils, cottage cheese. Batch hard-boiled eggs and keep cooked chicken in the fridge for easy grabs.
• Full-fat dairy: Whole milk, real cheese, full-fat yogurt. The fat-soluble vitamins and dense calories are the point, not an indulgence.
• Whole grains and starchy vegetables: Oats, quinoa, sourdough, potatoes, corn, brown rice. Carbs are not the enemy; they keep your body from burning protein for fuel.
• Salt to taste: On real, whole foods. Not on processed snacks. Just enough to make your food taste good.
• Plenty of water: Hydration supports blood volume. Drink enough that your urine stays pale.

And if you’ve ever worried about whether skipping a meal affects your baby, you might have asked yourself can a fetus feel hungry? They don’t experience hunger pangs like we do, but they absolutely rely on a steady, uninterrupted supply of glucose and amino acids. Frequent eating is built into the Brewer diet for that exact reason.

Frequently Asked Questions About Foods That Make Preeclampsia Worse

Can one bad meal actually trigger preeclampsia?
No. Brewer’s model frames preeclampsia as a cumulative nutritional deficit over weeks or months, not an acute reaction to a single food. But consistent, repeated dietary patterns that shrink blood volume or starve the liver can accelerate the cascade.

Do I really need to avoid celery and cucumbers?
Brewer warned against large amounts of diuretic foods and herbs specifically when blood volume concerns are present. A few slices of cucumber on a salad aren’t the issue; drinking multiple cups of strong dandelion tea or loading up on diuretic supplements is. Context matters.

What if I can’t stomach whole milk or full-fat yogurt?
Some women struggle with the richness, especially in the first trimester. Start with small amounts mixed into smoothies or oatmeal, and work up. If it truly doesn’t agree with you, talk to your provider or a dietitian about how to meet your calorie and fat-soluble vitamin needs from other whole-food sources.

The Bottom Line from My Kitchen Table

Dr. Brewer’s list of foods that make preeclampsia worse isn’t really a list of forbidden items. It’s a list of things that get in the way of the massive nutritional project your body is trying to complete. Every diuretic tea skipped, every whole-milk latte instead of a skim one, every hard-boiled egg grabbed instead of a granola bar is a small vote for your blood volume, your placenta, and your baby.

I didn’t follow the full Brewer diet during my own pregnancy, gestational diabetes demanded a different macronutrient balance with my dietitian, but I did learn to stop fearing salt, full-fat dairy, and my own hunger. When I fed myself like my body was doing something enormous, I felt better. My blood sugar behaved. My energy stopped cratering at 2 p.m. And that shift started with understanding what not to eat, and why.

If you’re navigating a high-risk pregnancy and trying to figure out what on earth to put in your grocery cart, I hope this gave you some clarity, and maybe a few hard-boiled eggs to batch for the week. Come find me over on the blog and tell me what’s worked in your actual, lived-in kitchen. Whatever yesterday looked like, today you’re already doing a good job.