during pregnancy, the greater their risk of having children with verbal IQs in the lowest quartile at 8 years old; behavioral problems at 7 years old; and poor social, communication, and fine motor skills in the early years.
The researchers concluded that any mercury you’d ingest from twelve ounces of fish per week is much less problematic than missing out on the omega-3s from the fish.
“We recorded no evidence to lend support to the warnings of the US advisory that pregnant women should limit their fish consumption,” the researchers wrote.
Salmon
Shrimp
Sardines
Scallops
Catfish
Pollock
Tuna (Wild Planet)
Swordfish
King mackerel
Tilefish
Shark
If you work out, keep it up. If you don’t work out, start.
Doctors used to tell pregnant women to go easy on the exercise. Turns out they were being conservative because so few studies had been done on exercise during pregnancy.
More recent research shows that exercise is so beneficial, it outweighs the miniscule potential risk to baby’s health. Signs of risk to the baby don’t even begin to show up until you’re exercising at a level that feels like an all-out sprint.
Benefits for mom and baby
Exercise benefits the brain, not just the body:
• Exercise increases blood flow, which stimulates the body to make more blood vessels. More blood vessels give the brain more access to oxygen and energy.
• Aerobic exercise also increases BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a chemical that grows new neurons. BDNF helps keep existing neurons going by making them less susceptible to damage and stress.
• BDNF karate-chops the toxic effects of stress hormones, including cortisol. In turn, baby’s stress-response system and limbic system can develop normally.
Cardio beats weights
Strength training doesn’t affect the brain like aerobic exercise does. A combination is great, but if you’re pressed for time and energy, go with aerobic exercise. Swimming tops the list. The water supports your weight and disperses excess heat from your belly. The exercise works your entire body. Even if you’re just bouncing along in the pool during senior swim, you’ll feel so much better. Your impressively swollen ankles will, too.
Listen to your body
How much exercise is too much? Not enough research has been done to know for sure. Maybe that’s why everyone says: Listen to your body.
I thought pregnant women weren’t supposed to go running or bicycling, so I cut back on exercise when I got pregnant. Soon, I didn’t feel healthy. Mid-pregnancy, I went back to my active lifestyle, respecting my mood in terms of how intensely I exercised. I felt so much better. For me, around eight months pregnant was the right time to scale back and just stroll around the neighborhood.
THE RESEARCH
Pregnant women—not used to working out—began exercising four times a week for forty-five to sixty minutes at a time. They started at about 12 weeks pregnant and continued through 36 weeks, doing things like hilly walks and step aerobics. Compared with women who didn’t exercise, the exercisers were more fit, fewer had C-sections, and they recovered more quickly after delivery. In another study, women who were 28–32 weeks pregnant ran on a treadmill to exhaustion, and the babies experienced only a brief blip in heart rate and blood flow.
What will you do for exercise? Be specific about the day and time.
Newborns can recognize a song or story they heard in the womb.
In a quiet place, pregnant women read a three-minute story excerpted from The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. The women read out loud twice a day for the last six weeks of pregnancy.
After the babies were born, researchers gave them pacifiers attached to machines that could measure their sucking. Stronger sucking triggered audio of their mother reading the story. Weaker sucking triggered audio of her reading an unfamiliar story. The newborns sucked more strongly. They wanted to hear their story! (Or, at least, its familiar rhythms and intonations.)
Your baby, too, likely will find familiar words or songs to be soothing. You can try reciting them as soon as baby arrives.
While you’re still pregnant, don’t bother reciting anything to baby until your third trimester. Before that, baby can’t hear you.
BILLIONS OF BERRIES FOR BLACKBERRY JAMBLE
My husband read Jamberry, by Bruce Degen, each night to my belly in the last couple months of my pregnancy. Turns out baby can’t really hear dad’s voice before birth. (We didn’t know!) Mom’s voice—resonating through and amplified by her body—is what baby can hear over the din of whooshes, sloshes, gurgles, and heartbeats in the womb. Still, my husband’s reading provided a lovely bonding time for us. And the book became a favorite bedtime story for baby.
Which song will you sing? Which book will you read?
Are you thinking you’ll move to a new city, start an intense new job, buy a new house, and finish remodeling just days before your new baby is born?
Here’s a better idea: weekly massages, lazy weekend mornings, and dinners spent laughing with friends.
That’s because toxic stress during the last few months of pregnancy transfers directly to baby. Excessive stress can
• make baby more irritable and less consolable;
• inhibit baby’s motor skills, attention, and ability to concentrate;
• damage baby’s stress-response system, causing fight-or-flight hormones to stick around too long; and
• shave an average of eight points off baby’s IQ (the difference between average and bright).
How to identify toxic stress
Not all stress is bad, of course. And not all people react to the same stress in the same way. For example, at nine months pregnant, I was racing to finish editing a book. I found the late nights, tight deadlines, and clashing personalities invigorating. Friends thought I was crazy.
The problem is when you feel you have no control over the things stressing you out. Unrelenting stress is the main culprit. Our bodies just aren’t built to handle a sustained assault of fight-or-flight stress hormones. An overly demanding job, a chronic illness, poverty, losing a job, an abusive