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Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy Being pregnant may bring a lot of changes to your daily life. One of the most common and major changes are dietary habit changes. Even if you had a healthy diet prior to becoming pregnant, you may begin to look at what you eat and how you eat different now that you're expecting. Here are some tips to ensuring your diet is what it needs to be during pregnancy.
Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy • Remember the food pyramid? It's a great place to start, eat more foods from the bottom (grains), then add vegetables and protein, fruits, dairy and finally sparingly use fatty foods. Many places have free handouts. It's a great tool to have for reference on the refrigerator. • Variety is very important. It helps ensure that you're gathering the daily doses of recommended vitamins and minerals every day. It also helps prevent boredom with your diet which can lead to straying.
Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy • Bring on the water! Staying hydrated has many benefits for the healthy pregnancy, including avoidance of early labor, healthier skin (meaning more elastic), and general decrease in pregnancy symptoms that are annoying (constipation, swelling, etc.). Juice has it's time and it's place but the majority of your fluids should be water. Other "drinks" like soda, coffee, etc. should not be included in your daily count of 6-8 8 ounce glasses a day. • Eat foods that remember where they came from! The closer to the source of the original food the better. For examples: green beans that are fresh contain more of the good stuff than those in a can; bananas are better than fried banana chips or a banana split! • Protein is the building block of every cell in your baby's body. Some studies have indicated that adequate protein intake (defined as 75 grams a day or more) can protect you against problems with ecclampsia and other disorders. It also ensures a great start for your baby.
Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy • Eat smaller frequent meals if you are plagued with nausea problems or heartburn or reduced stomach space later in pregnancy. This grazing, as I call it, can also help level out blood sugar levels making you feel a bit better during the day. Some women even find grabbing a handful of crackers or nuts on one of your midnight bathroom breaks to help with dizziness upon waking or nausea. • Keep a food log if you're having problems with your diet. It's a lot easier than trying to remember what you ate and can give you a good idea of the variety you're taking in.
Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy • Remember that weight gain is a necessary part of pregnancy. Do not diet or restrict foods without discussing this with your practitioner first. Eating well during pregnancy will ensure that the pounds gained go towards the benefit of the pregnancy and are more easily shed when pregnancy and lactation are done. • Vitamins are not meant to replace the foods you eat. Rather they are there to help ensure that you're intake is adequate. You can take too many vitamins and certain vitamins (like Vitamin A) can cause birth defects in large quantities. Be sure to show any vitamin supplement to your practitioner prior to taking it in pregnancy.
Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy • Junk food. It's not very practical to believe that you won't touch and junk food during pregnancy. A more realistic approach is to watch portion sizes and to avoid going overboard. It's easy to think of being pregnant as the time to put on as much weight as you want, but that does go within reason. However, having desserts or splurging a few times a week is not going to make or break the health of most pregnancies. Develop a healthy attitude towards the sweets and fatty foods in your life and the habit will take you a long way even after baby is born! • Special needs you may have might alter what you need as far as nutritional requirements go. This might be anemia (low iron), multiple pregnancy, teen pregnancy, diabetes, etc. Ask your practitioner if you have special needs for your dietary habits. Ask to see a nutritionist to help you with questions you may have.
Nutritional Tips During Pregnancy • Folic acid is one of many nutrients needed in a healthy diet for women of childbearing age," A well-balanced diet with a variety of foods can provide all those nutrients, including adequate amounts of folate. Women have options for reaching the folate intake goal: They can get the necessary nutrients and calories both before and during pregnancy by eating a well-balanced diet, keeping in mind folate-rich foods, nutrition experts say. Folic acid-fortified grain products, including breakfast cereals, will help, too. Dietary supplements are another source of folate. Any one or a combination of these options for ensuring adequate folate can help assure women of childbearing age that, if they become pregnant, their babies will be off to a healthy start.
How Folate Can Help Prevent Birth Defects • If you plan to have children some day, here's important information for the future mother-to-be: Think folate now. • Folate is a B vitamin found in a variety of foods and added to many vitamin and mineral supplements as folic acid, a synthetic form of folate. Folate is needed both before and in the first weeks of pregnancy and can help reduce the risk of certain serious and common birth defects called neural tube defects, which affect the brain and spinal cord. • The tricky part is that neural tube defects can occur in an embryo before a woman realizes she's pregnant. That's why it's important for all women of childbearing age (15 to 45) to include folate in their diets: If they get pregnant, it reduces the chance of the baby having a birth defect of the brain or spinal cord. • "Adequate folate should be eaten daily and throughout the childbearing years,"
How Folate Can Help Prevent Birth Defects • ways to do this are: • Eat fruits, dark-green leafy vegetables, dried beans and peas, and other foods that are natural sources of folate. • Eat folic acid-fortified enriched cereal grain products and breakfast cereals. • Take a vitamin supplement containing folic acid. • Nutrition information on food and dietary supplement labels can help women determine whether they are getting enough folate, which is 400 micrograms (0.4 milligrams) a day before pregnancy and 800 micrograms a day during pregnancy.
How Folate Can Help Prevent Birth Defects • Neural Tube Birth Defects • The technical names of the two major neural tube birth defects reduced by adequate folate intake are anencephaly and spina bifida. Babies with anencephaly do not develop a brain and are stillborn or die shortly after birth. Those with spina bifida have a defect of the spinal column that can result in varying degrees of handicap, from mild and hardly noticeable cases of scoliosis (a sideways bending of the spine) to paralysis and bladder or bowel incontinence. With proper medical treatment, most babies born with spina bifida can survive to adulthood. But they may require leg braces, crutches, and other devices to help them walk, and they may have learning disabilities. About 30 percent have slight to severe mental retardation.
How Folate Can Help Prevent Birth Defects • The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that about 2,500 infants with spina bifida and anencephaly are born each year in the United States. • Other maternal factors also may contribute to the development of neural tube defects. These include: • family history of neural tube defects • prior neural tube defect-affected pregnancy • use of certain anti seizure medications • severe overweight • hot tub use in early pregnancy • fever during early pregnancy • diabetes. • Any woman concerned about these factors should consult her doctor.
How Folate Can Help Prevent Birth Defects • Folate Sources • Folate occurs naturally in a variety of foods, including liver; dark-green leafy vegetables such as collards, turnip greens, and Romaine lettuce; broccoli and asparagus; citrus fruits and juices; whole-grain products; wheat germ; and dried beans and peas, such as pinto, navy and lima beans, and chickpeas and black-eyed peas. • Under FDA's folic acid fortification program, which became effective January 1998, the agency requires manufacturers to add from 0.43 mg to 1.4 mg of folic acid per pound of product to enriched flour, bread, rolls and buns, farina, corn grits, cornmeal, rice, and noodle products. A serving of each product will provide about 10 percent of the Daily Value for folic acid. Whole-grain products do not have to be enriched because they contain natural folate. Some of the natural folate in non-whole-grain products is lost in the process of refining whole grains. • Folate also can be obtained from dietary supplements, such as folic acid tablets and multivitamins with folic acid, and from fortified breakfast cereals. • A report recently released by the Institute of Medicine indicates that the evidence suggests that folic acid, the synthetic form of folate, may be better absorbed than folate found naturally in foods. The report also points out that, if taken in adequate amounts, food folate may eventually be demonstrated to be as effective as folic acid.
Tips for Morning Sickness • It's actually a misnomer. Morning sickness can strike at anytime of the day or night, sometimes all day and all night. • In any case about 50% of all pregnant women will experience some form of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Trying to eat a healthy diet can become very difficult when you've also got to deal with problems like food aversions, a sensitive nose, and a growling, churning stomach. Here are some ideas to help you get along your days and nights, and hopefully feel a little bit better.
Tips for Morning Sickness • Eat something high in protein before going to bed. Helps your blood sugar stay more level. • Two crackers before your head leaves the pillow is old but wise advice. • Have sips of ice water as the urge to purge strikes. Many women say that this helps them keep meals down as well. • Avoid foods and smells that seem to trigger nausea. Sometimes this will be nearly every food or every smell.
Tips for Morning Sickness • Ginger, teas, cookies, even the spice can be helpful in preventing nausea. • Smaller frequent meals can also help keep an ailing belly at bay. • Peppermint, either smelling it in aromatherapy form or sipping the tea can help curb nausea. It's also known to help with sagging energy levels. • Try peanut butter or other protein snack before rising from your bed. • A teaspoon of cider vinegar in a cup of warm water has been said to be effective.
Tips for Morning Sickness • Take a deep breath. It might be mind over matter sometimes. • Comfort foods! Eat what you can, if it stays down it is probably a good thing. Slowly add more foods to your diet as possible. • Sleep to avoid nausea. Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it. • One mom swears by cold veggies soaking in water to help relieve the churning feeling. • When possible avoid hunger, it can also make your stomach upset.
