If you've recently found out you're pregnant, you may be wondering when you should start purchasing prenatal vitamins. While, ultimately, you'll want to make this decision in tandem with your obstetrician, the general answer is that you don't necessarily need prenatals right away. You do, however, need to start thinking about certain supplements.
Early Pregnancy
Early in your pregnancy, your developing baby is very small. In fact, by the end of your first trimester -- around 13 weeks into your pregnancy -- your baby is still less than 4 inches in length and weighs just over an ounce. As such, your baby's nutritional needs are also very minimal. While the baby does need energy, vitamins and minerals, it needs so little of most of these substances that it doesn't significantly impact your nutritional needs until later.
Prenatal Vitamins
The purpose of prenatal vitamins is to help ensure that you're getting enough of the important micronutrients -- vitamins and minerals -- to support your own cells and those of your developing baby. In addition to the vitamins and minerals you'd find in a regular daily multivitamin, prenatals have extra iron and extra folic acid.
Your Nutrient Needs
If you were healthy before you got pregnant and are eating well during your early pregnancy, you don't likely need a prenatal right away. Your diet provides for most of your vitamin and mineral needs, and you don't yet need the extra iron -- and probably won't until around the fourth month of pregnancy -- in a prenatal. If you're having significant morning sickness, you may need to consider a prenatal right away, however, because you're not likely filling your vitamin and mineral needs with food if you can't eat well.
Folic Acid
One nutrient you do need from the very beginning of your pregnancy is extra folic acid. Whether or not you choose to use a prenatal from the beginning, you should take 800 to 1,000 micrograms of folic acid per day from the time you find out you're pregnant, explain Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz in their book "You: Having a Baby." Folic acid helps your developing baby form the neural tube, which eventually becomes the brain and spinal cord. This takes place very early in gestation -- before the eighth week.
References
- American Pregnancy Association: Baby Size
- "You: Having a Baby"; Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D.; 2009
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