The Importance of Diet During Pregnancy
Your baby is solely dependent upon you to supply all of the nutrients required for growth, energy and development. A nutrient deficiency obviously also has an affect on your own health. It can also compromise your ability to maintain the pregnancy and nourish your growing baby. Every aspect of your reproductive health, including the uterus, placenta and breast milk, is directly affected by what you eat. By eating well, you diminish these concerns. Friends and colleagues often remark that women have been successfully delivering babies for thousands of years without folate supplements or dietary advice. This is true, but if you look back throughout history (and still today in some cultures) pregnant women were nurtured, protected and even restricted to bed, with pregnancy regarded as a very special phase of life. To day, women work in more high-profile jobs and choose to have children at a later age. We have more demanding and stressful lifestyles, access to an unlimited range of processed foods and, unless you are eating only organic foods, the fruits and vegetables available today are perhaps not as nutritionally rich as our ancestor’s choices were. It is for all of these reasons that we need to place more focus on diet during pregnancy.
Your growing baby essentially eats the food you eat. Food is broken down, absorbed and distributed as energy and nutrients via the bloodstream. The placenta draws nourishment directly from your bloodstream and in turn nourishes the foetus. It will absorb everything that enters your body. This is why alcohol is a particular worry. The foetus absorbs alcohol from your bloodstream, but in a much more concentrated form. Compare your body mass to that of your unborn and you can understand the concern. Dieting and skipping meals can also be dangerous. As blood sugar levels drop from lack of food, not only do you deny yourself energy, you also deprive your baby of the fuel it needs to grow and develop. A foetus never stops growing and needs this constant supply of energy. In fact, the best and most common advice given about planning a pregnancy diet is to eat small, regular meals, and you can prevent most of the complaints of pregnancy by doing so.
Try to eat every two to three hours, five to six times a day, and make breakfast the most important meal of your day. No one, pregnant or otherwise, should skip breakfast. It refuels your body after a fast and keeps blood sugar levels in check from the word go. If you find it difficult to eat in the morning, have a single slice of toast or a healthy smoothie until you can stomach something more substantial. Studies carried out at Harvard School of Public Health have proven how much a newborn’s health is a result of its mother’s diet during pregnancy. Of the women in the study who had nutritionally balanced diets, 95 per cent gave birth to babies in excellent health. Only 8 per cent of women with poor nutritional diets gave birth to babies in good to excellent health. Looking after yourself goes hand in hand with producing a healthy baby.
Your body works harder during pregnancy than at any other time in your life. Your major organs function faster and more efficiently to cope with the increased blood supply required in pregnancy. Your heart works 40 per cent harder, pumping extra blood around your body. Your lungs keep this blood enriched with oxygen and your kidneys clean and filter it. A well-nourished diet ensures excellent health and strength of your organs and constantly replenishes essential nutrients. This is important because kidneys cannot distinguish between waste and nutrients. Water-soluble nutrients (vitamins C and B-group) are excreted and lost at a much higher rate when pregnant as the body flushes more fluids out more quickly.
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