Do we even need prenatal vitamins?
Do we actually need supplements or are they just expensive pee? Our grandparents didn’t take supplements or a pre-natal - do we actually need them or are we being duped by clever marketing? These are just a couple of the questions I get asked a lot by clients and friends who are trying to get pregnant or are just wondering about where or not they should take supplements in general.
While supplements are not a replacement for a nutrient-dense diet, things have changed a lot since our grandparents time. It would be great if we could rely solely on food for optimum nutrition, but there are lots of factors to contend with in our modern world.
Let’s break it down...
We now know better. We now have access to a huge body of medical research as well as advancements in technology meaning we know more than we did in our grandparents day. We now know that things like folate (folic acid) is integral to babies neural tube development in very early pregnancy and this was only discovered in the 70s. Research around other specific nutrients needed in pregnancy is coming to light all the time
Our grandparents ate very differently from us. Our grandparents will have eaten 100% seasonal food, grown locally (often in their own garden). Eating food that is eaten closer to harvest means that it is much more nutrient-dense. Nutrients start to degrade the longer the food is out of the ground and nowadays we have access to a huge range of international foods all year long. Many of them have travelled miles around the world to land on our supermarket shelves. Our grandparents also tended to eat nose to tail. Organ meats, particularly liver are rarely eaten in today’s western diet and are super nutrient-rich and packed with fertility supporting, system calming and anti-inflammatory fat-soluble vitamins and nutrients like choline. Many of us eating a typical western diet are missing a lot of these key nutrients as we are not eating these nutrient-dense foods.
The soil quality was vastly different back then. Unfortunately due to industrial agriculture and over-farming, our soils have been depleted of many essential nutrients, particularly mineral like zinc and magnesium, so it’s very difficult to predict the nutrient levels in fruit and vegetables.
We are living incredibly different lifestyles from our grandparents. Our modern life is incredibly demanding. Our always-on culture of technology, smartphones and screens means that we are never unplugged from stimulation. Our working hours are much longer and more of us are indoors and sedentary for much longer periods of time. Our lives are also much more stressful which means our bodies have a raised need for nutrients to fuel our neurotransmitter and stress hormone production and synthesis. We are also living in much more toxic times and are exposed to chemicals that weren’t around in our grandparents day and so our livers also have a raised need for the nutrients they need to detoxify these chemicals.
Our gut health is poorer. Our ultra-processed western diet and modern lifestyle has shifted many of our microbiomes and impacted our gut health meaning many of us less able to absorb our nutrients. Raised stress, a predominantly processed, low fibre diet, chemical exposure and a trend for disinfecting everything in the childhood home has meant there has been a shift in gut health and bacterial diversity in the gut. When our gut is compromised our ability to absorb is impaired meaning that we sometimes need a helping hand to boost our nutrient status.