Pregnancy for women, before, during and once you have had your baby.

Of course it’s such an important and very exciting time and you’ve got this one opportunity to get your body in tip-top shape to really grow that baby well.

A lot of us leave it to the last moment to consider falling pregnant and because of this the likely-hood of having more nutritional deficiencies , higher toxicity levels in your body and more hormonal imbalances is very high.  So I most certainly recommend trying to conceive when you’re younger – which is always better.

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There’s a lot of preparation before-hand, to get your body into absolute Tip-Top shape.  Naturally, these are the things I’m suggesting and the steps I recommend prospective parents consider to help ensure their body is ready and their developing child, nourished optimally.

The 1st thing, is to have a thorough check-up from your doctor and make sure that you have all your pre-natal blood tests taken.  This will involve being tested for your current folic acid and iron levels, and check that you’ve had your rubella vaccination.

Once you have the all clear from the doctor, then Naturopathically  I recommend considering completing a Detox, correcting any hormonal imbalances, nutritional deficiencies and making sure your diet is as excellent as it can be.  It is important that you remember, Everything you put in your mouth will feed your baby, so you want to make sure that your diet is as clean as possible.  Once you’ve got all of these things sorted out, then its time to try to conceive.

Preparation should start a good 3 months before your actually wanting to conceive. We hear about this 3 months, in relation to folic acid.  The WHO (World Health Organisation) suggest that women  take 800mcgs of Folic Acid 3 months before pregnancy and 3 months into our pregnancy.

But what about all of the other nutrients?

Don’t we need things like Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, essential fatty acids and B Vitamins?

Aren’t these all just as important as the folic acid?  My answer is Yes!  We do need to have a look at these different nutrients as well.

So as I said the first step has to be “go to your doctor” get everything checked out and make sure that you and your partner are in excellent health,  keeping in mind that you only have this one opportunity to get your body in Tip-Top shape – so do not rush.

Make sure that you get your Iron levels checked.  This is really important because a lot of women have low Iron and they may not even know about it. During pregnancy your Iron levels dramatically fall twice. They fall at 12 weeks and 32 weeks, so you really want to make sure that your iron levels are properly evaluated before you get to these times; when your Iron is automatically going to drop.  If you don’t evaluate it properly when you get to these stages and your Iron is already low, it will drop dramatically and then you may suffer from all kinds of symptoms, such as emotional erraticness, fatigue, breathing problems, appetite problems.  You may not be able to shut your brain off to go to sleep at night.  So it’s really important that any nutritional deficiency is assessed and then corrected before you consider falling pregnant.

Elevit pregnancy multivitamin

Now a lot of women are given a pregnancy pack by their midwife or GP. In this pack you will often find information promoting a number of different products but in particular the use of the nutritional supplement Elevit.  I have a problem with Elevit and the reason why is because it is promoted as the “be all and end all”  for pregnant women but if we have a closer look and see what’s actually contained in it  – there really is not a lot at all (mainly folic acid and Iron)

I really get hacked off when I see ads like this one, which I  found in a Womens magazine.  It is very important to read the information correctly, so you know what they are really telling you.  If we have a look at this one, we can see that it states:  “Proven In A Clinical Trial”.  What, just 1 clinical trial?

Then if we read the fine print down the bottom of the advertisement it tells us “The Australian Formulation of Elevit is the same as that which was used in the study except that it didn’t contain Vitamin A.  But does that mean it’s the same product? I really don’t think so.

When you have a look at Elevit, what you’ll find is contained in 1 tablet, 800mcgs of Folic Acid, 60mg of Iron, some B Vitamins, some Zinc and 125mg of  calcium.

Lets go back to the fact that Elevit is promoted as the “be all and end all” supplement for pregnant women to take.  So does that mean it has the 1500mgs (minimum!) of calcium that we need each and every day of the pregnancy? Or those B Vitamins that we so desperately need to enable us to have energy let alone function properly during the day. When I look at the Elevit supplement I see that it has 150mgs of calcium per tablet.  Are we supposed to find the other 1300mgs per day from our diet – every single day? I don’t think so! I think that will be pretty tricky and this just backs up that you need to always look at the back of supplements, read the ingredients and what you are being provided with, in order to find out what is really in the product.

I have so many women who come into my shop that are pregnant and they look a wreck. They’re stressed out, they can’t sleep, they’ve got nervous system problems, they’re an emotional wreck and they’re fatigued. When I inquire about what they are taking, they assure me that they are taking in the nutrients they need because they’re on Elevit! Then when I explain to them that Elevit is really only a Folic acid and Iron supplement their shocked, because they truly believed that Elevit was really providing them with everything that they needed.

As Naturopaths at healthyonline, we have a set protocol that we use specifically for pregnancy, to help to ensure that you are getting what you need, but not only for you but for your baby as well.  There’s lots of pregnancy Multi-Vitamins in health shops and on my website as well. What we find if we have a look at them, is  a lot of them really don’t have a lot of nutrients in them, in fact, most of them are really quite low in nutrients.

I have to ask the question though, Why would we take a supplement, when we are pregnant,  with less nutrients in it, than the supplement we take when we are not pregnant?  Surely our nutritional needs are a lot higher now that we are pregnant?   Don’t we need the nutrients to feed not only ourselves but our baby as well – so surely a multivitamin needs to reflect this?

I have a lot of great products that I recommend during pregnancy and believe me, I have first hand experience as to the difference that it makes, when we supplement properly during pregnancy compared to when we don’t supplement at all.

I have a lot of people that come into my shop who have really only just learn’t about the benefits and importance of supplementing, especially during pregnancy.  Ill recommend the particular protocol to take during pregnancy and they cannot believe the difference in their child when it’s born.  I have mid-wives who ring me and literally say “Leanne what was that pill that you gave my lady? Her baby is a chill-cat, they have slept from day 1 and they are the most cruisy, chilled out, happy little baby.” And all that was different was that we used correct mineral and vitamin supplementation, to make sure that the daily needs were covered.

So my favourite pregnancy supplements are:

Radiance Mineral Power

Radiance are a fantastic range because they are a New Zealand range.  One of the main benefits of this is that they (Radiance) have taken into consideration our soil depletion here in New Zealand.  I absolutely love this product.  What Mineral power is is a high potency calcium and mineral supplement. Each one tablet provides you with a huge 500mgs of calcium. Plus it has all of the other trace elements in it like Magnesium, Zinc, Selenium and Vitamin D (plus a whole pile of other minerals and trace elements) so everything that you need to absorb the calcium that is contained in it.

I put all of my pregnant women on this product.  To get your full 1500mgs of Calcium per day, you need to take 3 tablets.  It’s important to take calcium in the evening (away from food) as this is the time when it is absorbed best. If you take it at your meal you may not absorb it as efficiently, as if you were to take it away from your meal.

If your digestion really isn’t that great and you are not that good at breaking tablets down, you could try having your Mineral Power tablet or calcium tablet with apple cider vinegar in water.  This mix will help to enable your body to break it down better.  Just mix 1tbls of Apple Cider Vinegar (it must contain “The Mother”) with about 100ml of tepid water.  Swallow the calcium tablets with this.

Radiance Mineral Power is a very important part of my pregnancy protocol.

Of course there are so many multivitamin supplements on the market, but when I formulated my own multivitamin “Multi-Vite”,   I not only formulated this  taking into consideration our soil depletion here in New Zealand but I also formulated it so that pregnant women can safely take it too.

Multi-Vite pregnancy

So my clients use the Multi-Vite from Xcel Health. This provides you with 25mgs of each of  your main B vitamins. It doesn’t have the correct amount of folic acid in because in New Zealand, legally, we are not allowed to have any more then 300mcgs of Folic Acid in an over the counter product.  Elevit can have the 800mcgs because it’s a pharmacy product.  So each 1 tablet of MultiVite has 200mcgs of Folic Acid included.

When it comes to Folic Acid supplementation, the most important thing is that you go to your doctor and have a blood test to test your folate (folic acid) levels. So then you can know exactly what your levels are and how much you need to supplement with.  I find a lot of women have been taking folic acid and Elevit for such a long time, that by the time they actually do conceive, their folate levels are already off the scale – already over 45 (the reference range in NZ is between 9-45) .  This is generally not a problem though, because folic acid is essentially non-toxic but still,  why take something un-necessarily if your levels are already high?

So we take 1 Multi-Vite tablet at breakfast and this helps to cover our general vitamin needs, as well as some trace elements.

Superior pregnancy Iron

So from my own range I formulated a product called “Superior Iron”.  It has the 25 elemental milligrams of Iron in it. A lot of women are reluctant to take an Iron supplement because of the stomach problems that it can cause.  These include diarrhoea or constipation.  Just so you know, the main contributor to this symptom or side effect, is due to the form of iron that is used in the product. It is such a hard form to absorb, that all our body can do to deal with it is “dump” it in our bowel.  This is what contributes to the constipation or diarrohea – the form of iron, that your body is having a problem breaking down and then absorbing.  I had a pregnant customer who became so constipated using Ferrograd, that she felt her only option was to go and have a colonic, to try and clear this.  I was worried about her having a colonic while she was pregnant, but she sought professional help, at  The Colonic Clinic in Milford and in her situation, she was advised that this should help her.  When they finally cleared her bowel, they found a very large mass of this ferrous form of iron, accumulated in her bowel.  It was like a blockage.  I am not saying this will happen to everyone who uses this form of iron, but just so you know.  If you become constipated from using Ferrograd, consider swapping to another form of iron that does not cause this side effect.

When I formulated the Superior Iron I got our manufacturing company to purchase for me a special form of Iron (that they had never even heard of) called Iron Bisglycinate.  Iron Bisglycinate is one of the most absorbable forms of Iron (shown to be up to 4 times more absorbable than the ferrous forms).  One of the main benefits of this (apart from being so absorbable) is that it does not cause stomach upsets and doesn’t make you constipated. Yippee!

In Superior Iron I also made sure to add in Vitamin B12 (methylcobalamine) some Folic Acid and Vitamin C.  These are the main co-factors that you need in order to absorb Iron properly.  But do remember, you must have an Iron test first before you randomly take Iron.

The final product that I recommend before, during and after pregnancy is the excellent product called Efamol  Efanatal . Efanatal helps to make sure that you have a brain box child. This supplement contains all those long chain poly unsaturated essential fatty acids specifically involved with eye-brain function.

Efanatal Omega 3

It is important to take essential fatty acids before, during and after pregnancy, however THE absolute most important time is the last trimester of pregnancy and the first 3 months of breast feeding. This is because around this time the babies brain is developing so you need as much of these fatty acids as you can pump in.

Efanatal from Efamol is a wonderful product that has a lot of clinical research done on it and it is a special mixture of Omega 3 fish oil and some evening primrose oil.

The above are the main supplements that I recommend.

What I find often though, is that a lot of people think that what I have mentioned above is just too many supplements to swallow during pregnancy. Most feel like they are a pill popper taking this wonderful assortment.  So if you are wanting a “one hit wonder” supplement then Radiance have come to the party again.

Radiance Multi For Pregnancy

They have made a wonderful product : Radiance Multi for Pregnancy. I really like this product.  It is really well formulated, so long as you take the correct dosage.  Just because i have said it is really great and well combined, dont think by taking one capsule a day you are going to be covering your nutritional needs. Have a look and see what the products are actually providing you with.

In order to get your full amount of nutrients you are really going to need to take four of these a day (2 at breakfast, 2 at lunch).  So this is a one month supply. By taking the 4 capsules daily your getting a huge 1200mgs of calcium per day. So it’s only another 300 – 600mgs per day that you need to get out of your diet,  which will be a lot easier then trying to find the full 1500mgs if you are taking a health supplement such as Elevit, which only has 125mg per tablet.

I recommend these products are taken during breast feeding too, to help replenish body stores.