What to Eat When You're Pregnant : Healthy Eating for Two (part 2) - How to grow a baby - The healthy diet checklist

How to grow a baby

From conception to birth, a baby needs enormous quantities of nutrients to grow. The requirements include about 925 g of protein and 20–30 g of calcium, as well as a massive 680 mg of iron, equivalent to the amount found in about 34 kg of beef or 113 400-g cans of baked beans. Fortunately, you don’t actually need to consume all these extra nutrients. Just as your body becomes more efficient at using energy, so it gets better at extracting certain nutrients from the food you eat. As pregnancy progresses and you require more iron, so your body absorbs more. In the first three months of pregnancy, women have been found to absorb only 7% of dietary iron, but this increases to 36% around the middle of pregnancy and to 66% by the end. Because of these metabolic changes, your requirements for certain nutrients, including calcium, iron and vitamin B₁₂, are no greater than normal. However, many young women in the UK consume too little of these nutrients anyway, so it is important to ensure you have a good intake now. The requirements for certain other nutrients, including zinc, thiamine, riboflavin, folate and vitamins A, C and D, are higher during pregnancy.

Although it is essential that you get enough of these nutrients, you don’t need to worry about monitoring your intake of each vitamin and mineral every day. If you eat a healthy and varied diet, full of wholesome unprocessed foods, you should be getting all the nutrients you need. The healthy diet checklist below shows the different types of food you should be eating and the main nutrients they supply. You can see how a diet including all of these food groups contains all the essential nutrients.