PARENTING
OLD WIVES’
TALES Once you decide to announce your pregnancy to family and friends the fun begins. People cannot resist sharing with you their birth stories, be that good or bad, along with countless ‘Old Wives’ Tales’ and superstitions but is there any truth in them? We talk to Bababoom’s resident midwife, Becky Elliott, to get to the bottom of one of the most common.
W
ell as morning sickness is usually the first perk of pregnancy you encounter that seems a good place to start. Over the years I have heard countless remedies for morning sickness but by far the most common is ginger. While there is some scientific evidence in the use of ginger, for most women the cause behind the morning sickness is a drop in blood sugar levels. Imagine getting out of bed in the morning and going about your days work without any food in your tummy, yep you’d feel sick. Babies are incredible creatures and their development process in the early days uses up a vast amount of energy, your energy. We are all so used to not eating after 7pm but babies don’t stop taking from our fuel stash overnight just because we are sleeping, they still need to develop. We then wake in the morning with our blood sugar levels depleted as they have been robbed while we were sleeping and then feel sick, as we feel sick we don’t want to eat so the levels get lower and eventually
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ESSEX CENTRAL
we are sick. There are some really easy ways to help combat this. Now that you understand the reason why you can plan to eat more carbohydrates later in the evening, I don’t mean a plate of chips but some nice brown rice or brown pasta with your meal will take longer for your body, or your baby, to use up. Simple things like a banana just before bed or dried figs by the bed to munch on while having that 3am loo call are all simple measures you can take to help your blood sugar level normalise and help you feel better. For fear of sounding an utter bore, what you eat will really impact on your pregnancy, how you feel and your babies development, so whilst you don’t have to watch your waist line anymore, ensuring you have a good balanced diet with plenty of wholesome natural foods and a good water intake, by this I mean in excess of 2 litres a day, lots of the pregnancy symptoms your friends have warned you about you should escape. But for some, even heading this advice, they will still encounter the wonders of morning sickness and for those