Tag: Pregnancy Complications

Eating Well For You During Your Pregnancy

Eating healthy throughout your pregnancy is the greatest gift you could give your unborn baby, but there are also a lot of rewards in it for you to. It’s common for many moms to be to forget that they also benefit in eating healthy through out their pregnancy. What you eat has a direct effect as to how well your body copes and recovers from all the physical changes it goes through. It also helps with the physical and emotional challenge of carrying and delivering a baby.

The truth is, most pregnant women rarely walk around all nine months with that rosy glow everyone talks about. The first three months some of us walk around a nasty shade of green and in a hazy fog thanks to the tiredness we feel those first three months. The second three months are a little better, and we are no longer green but we deal with other issues such as varicose veins and leg cramps.

The third trimester, we are back to the hazy fog again and have other issues such as swelling and heartburn just to name a few. Some of these can be avoided with a good diet. Eating foods that have some complex carbs can help reduce your tiredness and staying away from fatty foods will help with the heartburn.

Research has shown that pregnant women who eat healthy throughout their pregnancy usually have a safe and uncomplicated pregnancy. Studies have shown that some pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia or high blood pressure can be directly related to deficiencies in a pregnant woman’s diet. High amounts of sugar and polyunsaturated fats increase this risk as well as having a low intake of vitamin c, e and magnesium.

Perhaps for some women one of the biggest benefits of eating healthy during their pregnancy is that it could help you during labor and delivery. A well balanced pregnancy diet has been said to help prevent preterm labor, which is labor before 37 weeks. A good diet can also help you cope with labor and delivery better. Any woman who has given birth knows how much energy it takes to endure hours of contractions and sometimes hours of pushing. Eating healthy will ensure that you have the energy and the stamina to get through your little one’s delivery.

Once you have delivered your little one, it is still important to continue your good habit of healthy eating especially in the postpartum period. Your body needs a lot of resources to recover from all the stretching, blood loss and not mention sleep deprivation and still take care of a newborn. It is just as important in the months following your delivery to continue to eat well. As my doctor put it, it is essential to eat as though you were pregnant for at least three months after delivery.

A final added bonus to eating healthy throughout your pregnancy is that you may never stop eating healthy. This is setting up the groundwork for a lifetime of eating healthy for not only you but for your children. If you continue to eat healthy you are setting a prime example for your children.

The Dark Side of Fish Oil: The Side Effects

First you need to understand that fish oil has a lot of benefits. The omega-3 fish oil belongs to the essential fatty acids which our body needs. Our body does not have any capabilities of producing the omega-3 so we rely on external sources, mainly fish rich in oil, as our main source. The fact that it is labeled essential fatty acid means that our body really needs it and the lack of which could result to a variety of health consequences.

Among the known benefits of taking omega-3 includes reducing the risks of having heart disease, can reduce the development of cancer cells, prevents pregnancy complications, improves eyesight and helps prevent depression. We can have a longer list but I wont trouble you with that, needless to say the benefits of fish oil are real. But unknown to quite few, the fish oil supplements that we all think of as friends has the dark side too, has side effects which when left uncheck can be quite harmful and can even prove to be fatal.

If our list of benefits is quite long, the side effects not as many. The side effects only manifests when one overdoses with the intake and can even disappear after a few days. Sometimes that body just needs to get used to the fish oil and once it has adjusted, the side effects would disappear. Some of the minor and immediate side effects include a fishy after taste and diarrhea.

These two often appears during the first few days of taking the fish oil. These symptoms should disappear after a couple of days but in case they dont changing brands of fish oil supplements might help. But setting up a meeting with your doctor would be the best idea.

After a couple of weeks of taking fish oil capsules, you might notice some fishy burping before and after each meal. This can just be because your body is still adjusting. Give it a couple of days and the burping might stop. Although, you should check the expiry dates of your of your supplements. You might also want to consider that what you have been taking are bad quality produce. Changing brands might help. Some suggest keeping the supplements in a freezer to prevent the various gastrointestinal side effects.

On the other hand, blood thinning is something that you cannot eliminate by just simply changing brands. You see omega-3 from fish oils is great for the heart because it is a natural blood thinner. They help coagulate the blood which helps prevent blood clots which helps prevent heart diseases.

But because omega-3 is already a blood thinner, people who are already taking blood thinning medications should avoid the intake of either the fish oil or the blood thinning drug. The possible problem with this is that people will get too much blood thinners resulting to patients bleeding out. The bleeding could be internal which can damage organs and could result to something fatal.

You should watch out for signs of internal bleeding like black stools or the presence of blood in the stool or vomiting of blood which are all signs of gastrointestinal bleeding. When you bleed in the brain the signs could be changes in your vision or speech, numbness of an arm or leg, and severe headache.

The dark side of fish oil is just that, one part of a fairly good supplement. There are ways to prevent the side effects and most of them through proper consultations before you even start taking those fish oil supplements.