The importance of prenatal vitamins

Pregnancy is a special period of life when the daily requirement of certain vitamins and minerals increases significantly. Both the mother and the growing fetus need these substances. It’s often said that pregnant women eat for two.

This is almost true, but a major part of the nutrient intake in this period turns into excess weight (postpartum weight gain is very typical, even though it also has hormonal causes). Yet neither the mother nor the fetus gets enough of other substances, even if the mother actually takes twice the usual amount of food a day. In this case deficiencies may also affect the development of the fetus.
This made so-called prenatal vitamins “fashionable”: these products aim to replenish those nutrient compounds of which there is often a deficiency during pregnancy. This means that if the composition of all such vitamins were scientifically well-founded and if they were based on the experience of recent decades substantiated by laboratory test, they would all have the exact same ingredients. But this is not so.