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Pregnancy Nutrition & Cravings


Pregnancy nutrition & facts about cravings


Pregnancy nutrition

Having children and giving birth to a child is one of the most amazing and fulfilling experiences a woman can have, not only do they nurture their child within them for months, but their love for them is also boundless. But are these new mothers living a healthy enough lifestyle, for their child to be optimally developed and for both to be at full health during and after the pregnancy.


Well, we are about to dive into some facts regarding the nutritional requirement these women will need and some guidelines to follow before, during and after the pregnancy.

Through research done over the matter of women’s health while they are attempting to become pregnant or have already fallen pregnant, the dietary guidelines recommend that when women reach child-bearing age, they should consume an adequate amount of synthetic folic acid daily from fortified foods or supplements (400 μg) to reduce risk of birth defects.


If women have iron-deficiency anemia at the beginning of their pregnancy, replenishing their iron stores during pregnancy can be difficult. So, women of childbearing age are recommended to eat foods high in iron, or iron-fortified foods with foods such as vitamin C–rich foods, which are an enhancer of iron absorption. There are a lot of nutrients that need to be consumed during pregnancy, but those will change and vary with each person, so we believe that the ones we mentioned are those that are crucial for every woman.


It should not be feared to gain weight during the pregnancy, if anything it is recommended to gain about 3.5-4kg in weight during the pregnancy, seeing as all the food and energy consumed is now shared for two, so having that bit extra can help limit health problems for both the mother and child throughout and after the pregnancy.


However, we do say that each weight gain plan should be personalised for each person (calculated through the pregnancy body mass index) to gain an optimal outcome for the woman and child’s health. In accordance with the nutrition, it is also important for the women to maintain a good level of regular physical activity, as it supplies many health benefits to the mother and child and reduces the risk of chronic disease.


Food cravings

Food cravings and commonly seen to appear during pregnancy and can have an influence on the increase or decrease of certain foods. They are associated with eating related pathology and are usually foods that provide energy to the individual. The general cause for cravings is still fully unknown, however it is suggested that physical and hormonal changes that happen to a woman during pregnancy could have a role in it.


There have also been suggestions that as the energy requirement has increased for the women, it has a physiological affect on taste sensitivity, which could then trigger the consumption for specific foods.


Through a scientific article that we used to help with our research, they discovered the types of food cravings most women have and how frequent they have the cravings. The most common at 35% of cravings were sweet foods like chocolate, this I feel may be predictable for most of you, but for others may come as a shock to not have the same cravings.


The next most common were fruits and fruit juices with 13%, followed by dairy products and protein both at 8%, then carbohydrates with 7%, the remaining 29% was varied to different food types like salty snakes, pickled foods, spicy food etc. However, through their findings, they were not able to isolate a distinct reason as to why women have cravings and the types of foods that they crave.


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