Not all sickness is a “ride it out” kind of problem, and if you sense that your nausea seems unusually severe, it’s worth checking out.
experience during pregnancy create a swirling GI storm that makes many expectant mothers quite literally sickened by the mere mention of food. (By the way, it used to be believed that morning sickness was psychological, which is untrue, except perhaps in a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of women.)
Factoid: New research shows that maternal nutrition is important not just for the immediate health of a fetus but also for his long-term health. Just recently, in fact, prenatal nutritional deficiency was linked to developing schizophrenia in adults. It may seem like an odd association, but not when you consider how fundamental in utero nutrition is to brain development.
Some scientists argue that morning sickness and aversions to certain foods are indeed protective. Aversions to meat or raw vegetables, for instance, can be the body’s way of protecting against bacteria. Others say that there’s less morning sickness in societies that don’t consume meat or caffeine. Unfortunately, none of these explanations will make you feel much better as you cope with trying to feed your baby when you don’t even want to feed yourself. And another big issue besides making sure that nutrients get to the baby is the risk that you’ll become dehydrated; about 1 to 3 percent of pregnant women actually end up in the hospital needing intravenous fluids to correct dehydration. Fact is, you may not be able to eliminate morning sickness; your real goal should be to learn how to manage it. Even though many women have terrible memories of being nauseous during pregnancy, almost all find a way to cope. Your challenge is to find the subtle tricks that work for you. With that in mind, we’re going to share a bunch of popular and safe tips with you at the end of this chapter.
Essential Ingredients:
The Nutrients That Both of You Need
Factoid: When women are obese during their first pregnancy, then lose weight via diet or bariatric surgery before getting pregnant again, the children born before the weight loss end up being heavier than those born afterward. Why? Thank epigenetics, as the environment in a heavy mom lowers a baby’s metabolism and teaches his body that it needs to store fat to survive.
Up until this point, we’ve pretty much dealt with the two extremes regarding food: getting too much and not getting enough. But the third leg of this nutritional tripod is the one that will really help you keep a balance. As you strive to eat the ideal amount of food, we also can’t emphasize enough that the issue is as much about quality as quantity. If, for example, you keep a reasonable calorie count for the day, but your main caloric driver comes in the form of one triple-decker fast-food burger with a super-sized side of fries a day, you’re not exactly creating the ideal nutritional environment for your child.
Instead, now is the time to really start thinking about food as medicine (if you don’t already). Everything you eat will be broken down into smaller molecules that will be transported from your blood to your baby’s via that blood lake and placenta interface that we outlined in chapter 2. So, we ask you, which would you rather your child’s blood be made of: the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that are the components of whole foods or the toxins, fat, and artificial junk that’s masquerading as food and committing some of the worst health crimes the world’s ever seen? We thought so.
The basics are pretty easy. (More details in our tips below.) For the best pregnancy outcome, follow this handy nutritional traffic signal:
While we’re on the subject of nutrition, it’s also worth talking a bit about vitamins and minerals—specifically, the important role they play in child development:
Vitamin A: Vitamin A aids in both cell development and brain growth, but this vitamin does have a drawback. There have been links between excessive amounts of vitamin A and an increased risk of birth defects, especially neural tube defects. (Be careful of eating too many meal-replacement bars, each of which may have 100 percent of your daily value of A. Get into the habit of checking the FDA nutrition labels on everything you eat.) You should consume no more than 15,000 IU (international units of A) a day while pregnant or just before becoming pregnant, as opposed to limiting yourself to about 3,500 IU a day from supplements and packaged foods when not pregnant.
Vitamin B6: Low levels of B6 are associated with a delay in the development of the baby’s nervous system. Plus, low levels are linked to problems for mom, such as morning sickness, preeclampsia, and complications during delivery.
Vitamin B9: You know it as the all-important prenatal nutrient called folate, which in adequate amounts reduces the risk of specific birth defects like spina bifida (an incomplete spinal cord). Getting the right amount during pregnancy—at least 400 micrograms (mcg) from supplements such as a prenatal folic acid vitamin pill and a total of at least 800 mcg including the amounts from food—also reduces your infant’s cancer risk for the first six years of life.
Calcium: A full-term baby accumulates 30 grams of calcium in bone mass, so a mom needs to make sure to get three or four servings of calcium-rich foods every day to maintain her own bone strength and get those necessary bone builders to her baby. We recommend taking 600 milligrams (mg) of calcium citrate supplements three times a day, plus 200 mg of magnesium twice a day. (Calcium without one-third the amount of magnesium leads to constipation, so choose your combo carefully.)
Iron: Because a mom transfers about 1,000 milligrams of iron to a growing baby and increases her total number of red blood cells by 20 to 30 percent, it’s important to get adequate iron during pregnancy.
DHA: The omega-3 fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) is a major structural component of the brain at a time when a fetus’s brain is doing a lot of growing. A minimum of 200 mg to 300 mg of DHA per day through fish, fortified foods, or supplements is what you should get to support a healthy pregnancy and grow a healthy baby. Recent research indicates that 600 mg to 900 mg may be even better. We recommend 600 mg.
Zinc: Low levels of zinc have been shown to be related to increased birth defects, low birth weight, miscarriage, and even behavior problems down the road.
Now, the truth is that you don’t need to count every milligram of every nutrient of every food that you eat. If you take a good prenatal vitamin every day with DHA, you likely have the basics covered. But that doesn’t give you a free pass to eat “whatever” for forty weeks straight. Make your best effort to eat healthfully, but accept that you’re going to deviate a bit over the course of your pregnancy—nobody’s perfect. In fact, slight deviations here and there are preferable to the alternative: stressing out over every single stray chocolate chip that somehow finds a home in your belly.
* Waist size is typically a better predictor of health risks than actual pound-for-pound weight, but as you might imagine, it’s not quite so reliable once you start needing to buy maternity pants.
* Preferably what’s inside the box.
* “Yes, I’d like a salad, some soup, and a medium-rare slice of Play-Doh. Blue if you have it, but green if not.”
* Morning sickness is a misnomer, because pregnancy-related nausea can, of course, happen at any time of the day.
During these next few months, we know that you’re not always going to make decisions as you normally would. That’s because shifting hormone