What Are Prenatal Vitamins?
Prenatal vitamins are specifically geared toward women thinking about becoming pregnant or who are pregnant. The concept behind prenatal vitamins is that some of a women’s nutritional and vitamin needs increase with pregnancy. A baby especially needs certain nutrients to develop.
Expectant moms don’t always take in enough nutrients in their daily diets. They aren’t a replacement for a healthy diet.
How Are Prenatal Vitamins Different From Traditional Multivitamins?
While there’s not a specific formulation for all prenatal vitamins, you’ll likely find that prenatal vitamins contain at least these key nutrients: Calcium. According to the Mayo Clinic, pregnant and adult women need 1,000 milligrams (mg) of calcium daily. Prenatal vitamins typically have between 200 and 300 mg of calcium.
Calcium is important for all women because it keeps their bones strong. Taking in enough folic acid is linked with reducing neural tube defects like spina bifida. This is 8 mg more than women who aren’t pregnant.
When Should I Take Prenatal Vitamins?
Always talk with your doctor before starting to take prenatal vitamins. While you can buy prenatal vitamins over the counter, doctors can prescribe them too. Prenatal vitamins can serve as a further supplement to lactating women who need plenty of nutrients to make breast milk.
Because the brain and spinal cord are already forming at the early stages of pregnancy, folic acid is vital.
Can I Take Prenatal Vitamins If I Don’T Want To Get Pregnant?
They’re geared to make up the common nutritional deficiencies a pregnant woman could have. Getting too much iron is associated with health problems like constipation, nausea, and diarrhea. Excess amounts of nutrients like vitamin A taken from synthetic vitamins could be toxic to a person’s liver.
They could also have adverse side effects.
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Are a few key differences, since some nutrient needs change when growing a human. Our third addition to our prenatal multivitamin: biotin, because scientific evidence suggests that higher biotin intake may be needed to meet the requirement for pregnancy.
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In some cases, we need the same nutrients as we do before pregnancy, but at different levels. For example, our.
Essential Prenatal
Since up to one-third of people have genetic variations that make it difficult to efficiently utilize folic acid, we opted to use a form called 5-MTHF, which is a bioavailable form for the body to use.
A good rule to shoot for is three months ahead, so that people can be already taking a prenatal multivitamin during the early weeks of pregnancy (before they might even know that they’re pregnant). Let’s talk about biotin as an example: Many women can meet their biotin needs through diet alone, since it’s found in a wide range of foods like eggs, avocado, beef, and yeast. *
Recently Gave Birth?
The truth is nutrient demands change again after birth, especially if breastfeeding. Another common question is iron. Our Essential for Women contains 8 mg per serving of iron, while our Essential Prenatal contains 18 mg per serving.
And while it’s true that some non-pregnant people may need more iron than others (due to vegan and other restrictive diets, as well as certain conditions), we recommend consulting with a healthcare provider to determine how to go about supplementation for specific needs before making the switch to a prenatal multivitamin.