Are there any special considerations for pregnant women or children when it comes to nutrition?

Before pregnancy, you need 400 mcg (micrograms) per day. During pregnancy and breastfeeding, you need 600 mcg per day of food or vitamins. Adequate and timely vitamin and mineral supplements To maintain a healthy pregnancy, approximately 300 additional calories are needed each day. These calories should come from a balanced diet of proteins, fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

Sweets and fats should be kept to a minimum. A healthy, well-balanced diet can also help reduce some symptoms of pregnancy, such as nausea and constipation. Pregnant teens need more of some nutrients than adult women, because they themselves are still growing. Teenage girls can give birth to smaller babies because they compete with the growing fetus for nutrients.

It's important for pregnant teens to make sure they're getting enough iron. Calcium intake is also important, because young women have not yet reached their maximum bone mass and inadequate calcium intake may increase the risk of developing osteoporosis in the future. Pregnant teens should eat about 3 and a half servings of milk, yogurt, cheese, or calcium-fortified alternatives each day to ensure that they meet their calcium needs. For women with easy access to low-quality food and who are overweight or obese, the evidence that supports nutrition before conception is insufficient and, for the most part, is observational.

Comprehensive nutritional supplementation (multiple micronutrients plus balanced protein energy) among women with inadequate nutrition has been associated with better birth outcomes, including a decrease in rates of low birth weight. The enormous amount of work done with animals, the observational studies on humans and the growing number of experimental trials aimed at understanding the importance of maternal nutrition are interesting, but research in the field of nutrition among pregnant women poses many challenges. The reluctance to offer a universal nutritional assessment is partly due to the implications in terms of resources and costs, but also to the lack of solid evidence of efficacy 4 or to the ambiguity about the acceptability of current nutritional assessment techniques between pregnant mothers and their care providers.