Calcium in Pregnancy – keeping levels high

Emma Leavens, Nutritional Therapist, currently 4 months pregnant.

Calcium, why do we need it? – for the growing baby’s bones, their conduction of nerve impulses and the formation of their heart and other muscles. Plus to make sure the huge amounts being used up from our bodies whist pregnant, are not depleted, leaving us osteoporotic and broken later in life.

Keeping your calcium intake up during pregnancy is not only about what you eat. It’s about what you don’t let pass your lips and how you treat yourself. So, the health conscious amongst you will know the good foods:

• Tahini – the best!!
• Poppy seeds – a teaspoon of poppy seeds has the same amount of calcium as 3 cups of milk.
• Plus – almonds, parsley, watercress, beet greens, buckwheat, walnuts, broccoli, spinach, pecans and most green foods, esp barley grass powder – great in pregnancy.

But what not to eat? The poisonous substances are:

1. Coffee – one cup robs our bones of 40mg of calcium
2. Soft drinks – they severely interfere with calcium/phosphorus balance, and too much phosphorus binds with calcium, making it unavailable in the body – so the body takes it from the bones
3. Sugar – decreases calcium and magnesium absorption
4. White table salt, the recommended daily serve of 6g makes the body excrete 24-40mg in the urine
5. Too many acid foods – e.g. grains and meat. Don’t eat these two together, have them separately with lots of raw veg so that your body dosen’t over acidify. If you’re too acidic, calcium will be leached out of your bones to alkalise the body.

Look after yourself – stress takes calcium out of the bones. Back in the caveman days, when they got stressed (ie running away from a giant tiger etc), the blood needed to thicken so a wound wouldn’t mean they bled to death. It was thickened by excreting calcium out of the bones and into the blood stream. Nowadays, we seems to be a low level of stress most of the time and are therefore probably losing calcium all day long. So, take time to relax, do your yoga and your massage and your baths, make it a priority, but don’t stress about it!