Prenatal Vitamins and Belly Fat

There are many misconceptions about both prenatal vitamins and belly fat among the general population, so it's not surprising that there's a misconception that combines the two topics and suggests you can use prenatals to lose belly fat. The truth is that there's no scientific evidence to support this claim.

Prenatal Vitamins

Prenatal vitamins are made up of many different vitamins and minerals, just as regular women's daily multivitamin supplements are. The only difference is that prenatals have larger quantities of two key nutrients: iron and folic acid. If you're pregnant, you need the extra iron to help increase your blood volume, explain Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz in their book "Biochemistry." Folic acid helps your developing fetus produce the structures that become the brain and spinal cord.

Belly Fat

When you consume more calories than your cells need at a given time, you convert the extra nutrients into fat, which you store in adipose tissue. There are many different places you can store fat on your body, but the belly is a common repository for fat, explains Dr. Lauralee Sherwood in her book "Human Physiology." Generally speaking, men store fat on the belly more readily than women do, but both genders can add fat to the belly as they gain weight.

Losing Belly Fat

There's a misconception that you can "target" belly fat. In fact, this is simply not true. If you consume fewer calories than you expend each day, you'll lose fat as you burn it for energy, but you lose fat from all storage regions--you can't do anything to specify which part of your body you lose fat from. This is true both of specific exercises and of supplements like prenatal vitamins--they can't make you lose belly fat.

Considerations

Aside from the fact that prenatals can't make you lose belly fat because no supplement can specially target the belly, prenatal vitamins can't actually make you lose fat at all. That's because there's nothing in them that affects your metabolic rate--they don't cause you to burn more calories or to burn fat. In fact, prenatals simply won't do anything for you that regular multivitamins won't do, assuming you're not pregnant.

References

• "Biochemistry"; Reginald Garrett, Ph.D. and Charles Grisham, Ph.D.; 2007
• "Human Physiology"; Lauralee Sherwood, Ph.D.; 2004