Pregnancy cravings can drive a woman crazy, making her feel as if she will go to any extreme to get what she wants, even if it’s the middle of the night. And you know who ends up going to get it for her, right?
How can you reduce the food cravings experienced during pregnancy and keep your spouse happy because he won’t need to make any more late night trips?
The answer is in your food choices during the day.
When you consider the nutritional reasons why someone might have cravings, you’ll discover there are four of them:
• Zinc deficiency
• Chromium deficiency
• Not enough protein
• Not enough healthy fats
Strategy 1: Eat Foods High in Zinc, Chromium and Niacin
When zinc and chromium levels are in the normal range, cravings are kept to a minimum. That’s because zinc and chromium are required for the glucose tolerance factor (GTF) proteins to work in your body. The GTF proteins help stabilize your blood sugar levels, and when the levels are in the normal range, cravings don’t occur.
Researchers have also added niacin to the list of nutrients needed for the GTF in your body. So let’s look at foods that are naturally high in these nutrients.
Foods High in Zinc Foods High in Chromium Foods High in Niacin
Toasted wheat germ Liver Bran
Liver Green beans Anchovies
Sesame butter (tahini) Potatoes Swordfish
Roast beef Grape juice Liver
Pumpkin seeds Orange juice Peanuts
Dark chocolate Apples Veal
Lamb Bananas White meat of chicken
Peanuts Broccoli Bacon
Tomatoes Sun-dried tomatoes
Brewer’s yeast
Molasses
You’ll notice that the foods on this list are all natural foods. None of them are processed.
Protein foods include beef, lamb, pork, fish, chicken, turkey, eggs and dairy products.
Healthy fat foods include coconut oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, butter, saturated fat in meats, and fat in egg yolks.
Strategy 2: Eating Naturally Means a Natural Pregnancy
And that’s another strategy that should be used to reduce pregnancy cravings: eat foods that are as natural as possible.
When you eat natural foods, you don’t crave junk foods. The craving for junk foods is not natural and indicates that something is off kilter in the body.
Have you noticed that when you eat refined foods, you want more of them in a few hours? This is because of what happens with your blood sugar levels. Immediately after eating junk food, your blood sugar rockets up into the high blood sugar zone. Your body calls on the pancreas to produce insulin so that the blood sugar level doesn’t stay high.
Stay Away from Junk Foods
Your body doesn’t want to have high blood sugar because it knows that if left untreated, high blood sugar can cause coma. So your pancreas ends up producing an extra large dose of insulin. This high dose ends up bringing your blood sugar level down into the low blood sugar zone where you begin to feel hunger, get food cravings and headaches, feel irritable, dizzy and a whole host of other symptoms. This occurs about an hour and a half to two hours after eating junk food.
If you kept a journal of pregnancy cravings, you’d find a pattern to them: the meal that was eaten before the cravings started wasn’t full of nutrients and most likely contained junk food.
Thus, your goal is to eat as many natural foods as possible during your pregnancy. And there’s another advantage to this: researchers have found that cutting out junk food results in babies with a perfect weight more often; not too big and not too small.
This may occur because blood sugar levels are higher if you consume junk food during the day. The higher blood sugar level in the mom is transferred to the baby in the umbilical cord, which means the baby gets a high dose, too. High blood sugar sets a whole series of metabolic and biochemical reactions into action in the body.
These reactions involve excessive amounts of insulin, which makes cells grow bigger than normal. Just as an adult turns into an overweight adult more easily with high blood sugar, a baby too can become a bigger baby with high blood sugar coursing through the veins.
There are problems associated with babies that are too big and those who are too small. Big babies make it more difficult to give birth and increase the chance of needing a C-section. Very small babies can start out life with the “failure to thrive” syndrome and are at risk for developing infections.
Eating natural foods high in nutrients and staying away from junk foods is a recipe for reducing not only pregnancy cravings but also cravings during life. Using these strategies, you’ll notice a more even-keeled day every day of your pregnancy with very few moody days. It’s truly a pregnancy that is a dream come true.
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