My take on the nutrition during pregnancy

There are surely as many views on pregnancy nutrition as there are pregnancies. For a first time pregnant mother-to-be it can be though tough to find the way in the jungle of information. Thus wanted to share what has worked for me. My style is combination of Finnish and American research based information and most of all, common sense.

I have been interested in nutrition, as well as nutrition supplements since I was a teenager. I worked as a side job during school breaks at the sports nutrition importer and got to learn a lot about importance and impact of nutrition and supplements to body's ability to perform. I admit openly to be bit of a nutrition and exercise freak. I love keeping myself updated about the latest research and experiment as well. Of course always listening to my body.

The importance of nutrition has only increased its importance to me during the pregnancy. In particular when I was ordered to bed rest. As ensuring that one can give the body what it needs but at the same make sure that you do not overload it and keep your weight gain in the healthy levels. The below list is naturally on top of a healthy meal diet, which should include good variety of healthy foods. For me this meant healthy home cooked meals, supported with daily vegetable and fruit additions and no sweets. I have been limiting the overall intake of sugar to very minimum. Only during the late 3rd trimester I have allowed myself occasional desert. Just because sugar can have so much negative impact on the pregnancy but also later in life for the child.

Please note that these are just my personal preferences and things, which have worked well for me. As each person is individual and their body reacts to pregnancy differently, listen to your body and use your common sense, as well as your personal preferences.

Prenatal Vitamins
I started taking these the moment we started talking about wanting to start trying to get the new family member going. For me this meant for me just changing from daily vitamin to prenatal vitamin.
I ended up choosing GNC Prenatal Formula with Iron (LINK) but without DHA (Omega 3).
Reason for this was simply lessons learned from sports. Due to the increased blood amount iron will be one of the crucial building blocks to keep the nutrition flowing to the baby. The better hemoglobin, the better capacity for the blood to carry oxygen.

If one needs additional iron to support Floradix is a great product. As it is liquid, it is absorbed well by the body and minimizes the stomach irritation.

Fiber

Important support during pregnancy and the further one goes in the pregnancy, the more one learns the importance of it. I have been fiber fan always and eaten my full rye bread instead of white bread. In Finland we have full rye bread, which has high fiber consistency. I have luckily been able to find few places, where one can order Finnish rye bread.
Apart from that I enjoy good portion of Metamucil every morning, followed by fiber rich breakfast: steel cut oats with berried and mix of milk & greek yogurt.

With this approach I have not had any issues of constipation during pregnancy. Also was able to avoid hemorrhoids till this week. Sisu's has grown so well and has taken the start position, which I think to be the reason the pressure has grown.

Omega 3
I chose to take Omega 3 / DHA separately because of my experience of mixing DHA to a multivitamin results to issues in allowing the body to take the maximum benefit of the DHA. I have taken Omega 3 / DHA supplement separately since...I was a little child myself. My nanny gave me spoonful of fish liver oil everyday. All the other kids hated it, where as I was always eager to get my daily portion :)

Omega 3 is important on so many counts, for the mother and the baby. Starting from positive impact to one's mood / mental balance, i.e. minimizing the risk of pregnancy or post pregnancy depression. For the baby it support the brain, visual and neurological development. Since the intake of fish products should be limited to the recommendations by the various medical sources, one needs to make sure to get enough Omega 3 otherwise.
I took already before the pregnancy GNC Triple Strength Fish Oil 1500 (LINK) and decided to continue with it.

Mainly because it has really that what my body needs and it had good rating by various consumer tests. I personally try to avoid, apart from multivitamin supplement, to buy product that has a hole host of things mixed in. I take vitamin-D and Omega 3 separately, again to help to make sure that my body can absorb what it needs in the best possible way. Often when too many different things are mixed into one tablet, there is no guarantee that your body is able to take everything in.

Probiotics
There have been even few recent Finnish studies supporting the additional intake of probiotics during the pregnancy and also during breastfeeding. Link to Reuter's article about one of the studies.

Impact to skin rash / eczema
The outcome of the study support that intake of certain probiotics during pregnancy helps to reduce the risk of eczema and other skin allergies. I read through the research and listed down the probiotics used in the test, hunted for the product which has the same selection of probiotics. The study also showed that children to mothers, who took probiotics during the pregnancy and breastfeeding, were prescribed less antibiotics than comparison group's children. (LINK to the study)

Impact to weight management and gestational diabetes
There are studies, which show positive impact of the intake of probiotics during pregnancy to avoiding gestational diabetes. As well as positive impact to weight management during pregnancy.

Impact to colic
Studies show also positive impact in reducing or avoiding colic. This is due to baby's improved flora of the bacteria in the intestine organs. In Finland one starts to give probiotic drops to the baby few weeks after birth as a normal procedure. Where as in US the probiotic drops are all labelled for colic treatment. Giving the baby the probiotic drops well before any colic symptoms even appear help to mitigate and minimize the colic related intestine organ related issues. (LINK to WebMD)

Again, you will find hundreds of products but the trick is to take the time to investigate the product content and ensure you get the quality content and the right probiotics. PB8 has all the probiotics, which were used in the pregnancy studies I have read.

Vitamin D 
Whether living under the sun or not, vitamin D is necessary addition to the regular diet. Especially during pregnancy. I have taken additional vitamin D supplement for years already. Simply because when I lived in Finland, the amount of day light is rather limited during most part of the year.
Vitamin D has impact to helping Omega 3 to absorb better and those two together contribute a great deal to mental health.

During pregnancy the studies show that proper vitamin D intake helps to secure baby's proper development. It helps to reduce also the risk of preterm delivery.

I did a wide search on the various studies to understand whether the dose in the prenatal vitamin is enough. I saw few studies about the benefits of taking high dose of vitamin D during pregnancy (LINK) and decided to go with that.

In my case, I have been able to avoid gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. My blood pressure has been 90% of the time giving great readings. Only few times for some reason when at the doctor's office, it was momentarily higher. Excitement or what it may have been.

The more I read about the studies around the above mentioned, the happier I am that I chose this path. Am sure that once Sisu is born, I get real life data to confirm my personal research :)

Wk 33 - Learning a lot about the little fellow already

Mondays have gotten a totally different meaning nowadays. Monday is always the cut off to a new pregnancy week in my case, thus a very positive day. One week further again, hurray!

On Sunday, which closed the wk 32, was a happy day.
My husband got me a nice picture with the text: "You are my sunshine". It made me happy. There are rare moments when I momentarily feel that me and the Kugel / Kuula (Canon ball) are kind of full maintenance, since I cannot do anything useful around the house. It was so nice and uplifting to get the confirmation that we as a team are doing fine and my positive spirit shows.

We felt like celebrating on Sunday evening reaching one of the milestones: getting beyond the worst risk zone. In our case this meant eating air popped popcorns (no salt, nor butter) and slice of carrot cake. Wuhhuuu! I do not eat much of sweet stuff anyway but have cut it to nearly non-existence during the pregnancy. Eating the slice of a carrot cake was funny experience. It was awesome but it also felt like more than plenty. I could feel that my body was momentarily confused about what was going on :) All that fun was accompanied by Madagascar 2 movie. In other words a perfect celebration evening!

I cannot wait to have Sisu in the age, where we can watch cartoon movies together. I just love cartoon movies and family movies. I still recall one of my god-daughters once looking at my DVD shelf (before I gave most of them away when moving to US) and asking:"Aunt-Inna, why are you having so many kids movies but you do not have any kids?" I tried to answer her first like a normal adult would:"So that you would have plenty to watch when ever you are here." But kids know when you are trying to bluff...she looked at me with her eye brows shrunk. The facial expression that has the stamp all over:"Not buying any of that!" I gave in and admitted that I just simply love watching cartoon movies. After which we sat together, in our home made movie theater, watching one of the movies and had so much fun :) My nephews have learned it fast too that I like watching what they watch. Which sometimes means...watching the Cars movie 5 times :)

The past days and nights I have learned to tell bit more the different movements that Sisu has. As I have shared before, he is a very active little guy. I have been able to learn by observing the different pattern and strength of his movements between when he is active, sleeping or even crying.

Yes, crying is not something they learn from the spot when they are born and do the trick like masters from first attempt. Research shows that from wk 28 onwards babies express their displeasure while crying in the womb. Since there is none or very little air bubbles there, it more like a silent cry.

But I was able to tell one night our little guy not being very happy, he was kicking and boxing, strong punches, with all 4 at fast speed. He woke me up with that.
Not sure if it was all the refried beans that my husband has cooked, which may have, apart from making him displeased, but also provided some air bubbles to the womb as well. LOL! As in the silence of the night I could hear few very faint wailing sounds coming from....inside of me (no, it was not intestant grumbling).
More like the sounds that dolphins make to each other when they are under water.

I followed my instinct and started talking with a calm voice, also rubbing the spots, where I felt his feet kicking. Few moments later he calmed down and I could feel that his movements changed to the ones he has, when he sleeps.
At that moment I wish I could have woken up my husband but did not dare. I was smiling this huge smile in the darkness of our bedroom. Before our little boy has been even born, I was able to calm him down. I was able to communicate to him in a way, which helped him to go back to sleep. No words can describe the happiness cloud that I was sailing in for a while, until I too fell asleep.

When Sisu sleeps the movements are more gentle. More like a little the cute dog puppies when they are twitching during their sleep. Very gentle, short and small movements.

Most of the nights Sisu lets me sleep and he seems to sleep most of the night too. In the morning he usually makes sure that I get my internal alarm as per the routine schedule, at 8 am. If I am not up by then, little boxing and kicking starts. No matter which day of the week it is.
Some mornings I am able to negotiate with him that we will stay in bed bit longer :)

During most days he has his exercise routines, which include aqua yoga, aqua stretching, boxing and dancing. Some days it feels like he is renovating more space in his belly apartment, as the bouncing around looks more like something is gonna come through the belly soon. Sisu seems to really like it when me or my husband stroke the spot, where we can feel his foot stretched. So, he is getting pampered already with a baby massage :) :)

There have been only few nights, when he has been dancing the night away and not giving me the internal alarm in the morning.
It seems that both of us are sensitive to the full moon :) Last night I was awake and Sisu was having a full moon party to celebrate the super moon. Same thing happened with last full moon. I take it positively though. Being sensitive to the moon cycle means that one has the bond to the nature and its energies, which to me has always been an important connection to have in life.

Talking about the nature....
As the Halloween and autumn time is approaching; from me and Sisu in the Kugel/Kuula - wishing you an autumn and Halloween filled with joy!