Pregnancy Nutrition Related Articles & Blog Posts

Not Found in Most Prenatal Vitamins! Chromium is a mineral that works with insulin to maintain normal blood glucose levels. This can be especially important during pregnancy. Only 30 micrograms a day are needed, but many people don’t get enough. Food sources include brewer’s yeast, onions, broccoli, turkey, tomatoes, Romaine lettuce, grape juice, ham, potatoes, [...]

Niacin, Riboflavin, Thiamin, Pantothenic Acid, and Omega-3 Fatty Acids These are the only remaining nutrients of which we know women need to increase their proportional intake during pregnancy. Pregnant women are designed to eat diets richer in these nutrients. Like all of the nutrients we have covered so far in this chapter, niacin, riboflavin, thiamine, [...]

Zinc The only other nutrient whose requirement increases by more than 30 percent is zinc. Zinc is found in almost every cell in the mother’s and the baby’s bodies. The baby needs zinc to support its burgeoning growth and to make each new copy of DNA. Zinc is vital for the newly awakened sense of [...]

Vitamin B6 and Iodine We only know of two other nutrients whose requirements increase by more than 40 percent during pregnancy. Again, we have one vitamin and one mineral: vitamin B6 and iodine.

The Gift of Iron Iron requirements also soar during pregnancy. Both the mother and the baby need iron to build red blood cells. A pregnant woman’s blood supply increases by 1/3 over the course of the pregnancy. Babies must grow their entire blood supply from scratch – and scratch includes iron. Iron is also a [...]

How Much Folate Do You Need? Preventing neural tube defects is the poster child for folate supplementation. But folate is also critically important whenever a new copy of DNA is made. Each new cell in the baby’s rapidly growing body requires a new copy of the baby’s DNA. In addition, folate is critical for the [...]

Folate and Iron Out of all the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in our diets, we only know of two whose requirements increase by 50 percent or more during pregnancy: one vitamin and one mineral, folate (also known as folic acid) and iron. Deficiency of either folate or iron can lead to anemia in the [...]

During pregnancy, every ounce of baby’s growing body after that very first single cell has come from her mother’s own body. The brain, the heart, the muscles are all built from nutrients that were once part of her mother. The baby is quite literally her flesh-and-blood offspring. Nutrients that Mom eats during pregnancy, or that [...]

What Is There for the Baby to Smell? The amniotic fluid is like a living bowl of salty soup. The cells in the baby’s nose can detect the ingredients in that soup and send messages about them to the brain. The composition of the amniotic fluid varies from woman to woman and from time to [...]

Pregnant women who are vegetarians may be unnecessarily worried by prenatal screening tests, according to a study from the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taipei. The study followed the pregnancies of more than 200 women, half of them vegetarians.  Results were published in the February 2004 American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Beta HCG, the [...]