Two of the vitamins that pregnant women are often missing in their diets – to the detriment of themselves and their babies – are Vitamin A and Vitamin D. These essential vitamins are difficult to substitute in the form of supplements, since the body doesn’t assimilate them as well when they come in the form of an unnatural powder or pill. Luckily, there’s one great way for pregnant women to add these vitamins to their diet: cod liver oil.

Why You Need These Vitamins

There are lots of myths abounding about Vitamin A during pregnancy. In truth, though, most women are only at risk of “overdosing” on this essential nutrient if they take too much synthetic Vitamin A in the form of a pill (or in the form of certain anti-acne medications that are hard on the skin and the body alike). However, if you are avoiding supplements and multivitamins and are using the best pregnancy diet possible to get all the nutrition you need during pregnancy, overdoing it on Vitamin A isn’t a concern. In fact, not getting enough Vitamin A has been linked to certain birth defects, so it’s important to ensure that you and your baby are getting enough of this essential nutrient through your diet.

Vitamin D is another essential vitamin for pregnancy. Studies have definitely shown that it’s essential for optimal growth for the baby, and it seems to play a vital role in growing organs and bones in growing babies. Besides being essential for fetuses and breastfed babies, Vitamin D is also a mood regulator for pregnant and nursing women (and pretty much everyone else!). Those who are deficient in this vitamin are at greater risk for developing depression during and after pregnancy. However, Vitamin D can be a bit hard to come by, especially since most women don’t get any raw dairy products, which abound in this vitamin, during pregnancy.

How Cod Liver Oil Helps

Because liver is so high in many vitamins, particularly Vitamins A and D, cod liver oil is one of the best ways to supplement for these vitamins in your diet. The best way to get them is, of course, in the form of whole foods – such as raw dairy products and animal organ meats. However, if you have trouble finding the foods you need in order to get these vitamins into your diet, or if you are feeling nauseous and aren’t able to eat as much as you should during the early part of pregnancy, you can consider adding cod liver oil to your diet.

The best way to have cod liver oil is to mix it with a high quality butter oil, such as the one recommended in Healing Our Children from the company Green Pasture. Taken together, these two oils have a synergistic effect, with each one making the other even more effective. The best option for cod liver oil is the fermented cod or skate liver oil by Green Pasture, which you can find at www.codliveroilshop.com.

While you can get cod liver oil at your local supplement or health food store, this is likely to be subjected to harsh refining, which strips away the Vitamin D. Then, vitamin D is often added back in, but this artificial vitamin isn’t helpful to your body at all, so you may as well not pay for it. Store bought cod liver oil by companies like Nordic Naturals can help add Vitamin A and some other essential nutrients to your diet, but if you need a Vitamin D boost, you need a more naturally extracted oil.

Your body knows what it needs if you’ll just listen to it! Some days you’ll end up eating more than others, especially when your baby is going through a growth spurt, but once you let go of your pre-conceived ideas of what your pregnancy diet “should” look like, you’ll be able to eat healthily even on days like these!

To find out more about what you should be eating during pregnancy to get the best pregnancy diet and give your child the best possible odds in life, check out Healing Our Children. This book talks about all sorts of different natural, whole, organic foods that you may not be aware of but that can help get your child off to the best start in life.