When you are pregnant, proper nutrition is important. However, you need more nutritional support than you can get from food alone. A good prenatal vitamin is not only essential for the health of your growing baby, but for your body too. How do you choose the best prenatal vitamin from the vast variety that are on the market? Even more importantly, how do you keep your prenatal vitamin down if you have trouble with nausea and vomiting? Here are some tips for choosing and taking prenatal vitamins.
The most important tip for choosing a prenatal vitamin is to work with your health care provider to see what he or she would recommend for you. Each woman’s nutritional needs are slightly different, and your prenatal care provider can let you know what type of nutritional support you need whether it is just one vitamin, or a vitamin paired with one or more supplements. They may even be able to recommend one or more specific brands. During my last pregnancy, my midwives suggested that I take a prenatal vitamin that had nutrients which were derived from food. The brand that they suggested was very expensive, but I remembered that the brand of prenatal vitamins (Rainbow Light) that I had used during my first pregnancy was food – based so I used them again.
Of course, the best prenatal vitamins in the world will not do you or baby any good if they don’t stay in your body. Prenatal vitamins are notorious for making already queasy tummies (and even not so queasy tummies) rather upset. Sometimes the reason that a prenatal vitamin is so huge is that it has a lot of calcium in it. There may be smaller pills available without the calcium and you may be able to take chewable or gummy calcium supplements instead. Of course, check with your care provider and let them know that you need something that is gentler on your stomach. The added iron may also be the cause of your discomfort, so check with your care provider to see if there are any alternatives in that department. It may also be helpful to take your vitamin with a meal so that it is not just sitting there in your stomach.
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