When a woman becomes pregnant, or even earlier, if the pregnancy was sought, she usually takes supplements of folic acid and iodine, to help the proper formation of the fetus, especially during the first three months of pregnancy.
There are multivitamin complexes on the market that in addition to carrying iodine and folic acid include “a little bit of everything,” whose effect on the baby and in the pregnancy process is not known too much (remember that an excess of vitamins does not have to be good ), but that they usually consume a lot because of: “since I take a pill, if I take more vitamins and minerals with it, the better”.
A recent study conducted in Denmark and the US has tried to shed some light on the matter, resulting in Women who take vitamin compounds when they get pregnant may have a lower risk of having a preterm birth or that the child has low birth weight, or not.
For the study, a sample of 35,897 pregnant women in Denmark has been taken and the use of multivitamin complexes in the period between 4 weeks before conception and eight weeks after the last period (that is, one month) has been analyzed before pregnancy and two months later).
Benefits of multivitamin complexes
The results show that the women who took these complexes, for at least eight of the 12 weeks, they had 4.3% of premature births. Women who did not take multivitamin complexes had 5.3% of premature births. Similarly, those who took vitamins were less likely to have a small baby for gestational age.
But nevertheless…
Despite the results, researchers are cautious in promoting the use of multivitamin complexes for some variables that could reduce credibility to the data obtained.
When the feeding and smoking of the women of both groups were considered, the differences continued to exist, if the mothers had a normal weight these differences were also seen (from what I understand that when the mothers were overweight there was no difference between those who took vitamins and those that don't).
When analyzing more variables, they realized that participants who took supplements tended to have healthier habits than the rest, important data that could be the cause of that 1% difference observed between some women and others.
Finally, the authors consider that studies that show the effects of vitamins on babies are missing, so, directly, they do not recommend pregnant women to take vitamin complexes (nor do they recommend that they not take them, of course).
Personally, I believe that a woman does not have to take extra vitamins if she has a proper diet. In the food there are all the vitamins, so I would stick to taking folic acid and iodine exclusively.
In women with a lot of nausea and very little appetite that certainly they are eating much less than they ate before, yes I think it might be interesting to take some multivitamin, but only temporarily until the woman returns to eat in a more or less balanced way.
