During pregnancy, a woman's body provides nutrition to her developing baby. When she eats food, she digests that food and absorbs the nutritional chemicals into her bloodstream, from which she passes them on to the baby. Prenatal vitamins help ensure that her body -- and therefore her baby -- will get adequate levels of vitamins and minerals that are crucial to health.
Significance
Prenatal vitamins play several important roles in pregnancy. For instance, hosting a developing baby is hard on a woman's body, and the baby takes nutrients from her bloodstream so efficiently that if she's not careful with her nutrition, she can end up nutrient deficient, explain Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel in their book "What To Expect When You're Expecting." Pregnancy vitamins provide for a developing baby, but help protect the mother as well.
Function
There are many different specific functions of prenatal vitamins. Some components, like vitamin C, help ensure that women get enough of the essential vitamins even if they're not able to eat well -- if, for instance, they have morning sickness. It can be hard to eat a balanced diet, especially early in pregnancy, explains Dr. Miriam Stoppard in her book "Conception, Pregnancy and Birth." Prenatal vitamins provide all the normal vitamins and minerals that a healthy adult requires.
Features
Prenatal vitamins have special features that differentiate them from normal multivitamins. For instance, prenatal vitamins have higher-than-normal doses of folic acid, which is an important vitamin during pregnancy. Folic acid is a B-vitamin and helps with proper formation of the neural tube, which is an embryonic structure that later develops into the spinal cord and column. Regular multivitamins don't have adequate amounts of folic acid for pregnant women.
Considerations
When taking a prenatal vitamin, pregnant women should be aware that some typical ingredients are actually incompatible with one another. For instance, explain Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz in their book "You: Having a Baby," the body can't absorb iron and calcium together. As such, it's best to find a prenatal vitamin that contains iron, but not calcium, and take a separate calcium supplement at a different time of day.
Expert Insight
Prenatal vitamins have high quantities of iron, note Drs. Roizen and Oz. Therefore, they can lead to stomach upset and constipation, because iron slows digestion down even further than it is normally slowed by the hormones of pregnancy. Some women find that drinking plenty of water and eating a high-fiber diet prevents symptoms of constipation related to prenatal vitamins. Others, however, prefer to break their pill into two parts and take them at different times of day.
References
- "What to Expect When You're Expecting"; Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel; 2008
- "Conception, Pregnancy and Birth"; Miriam Stoppard, M.D.; 2008
- "You: Having A Baby"; Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D.; 2009
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