Several women benefit a lot from the important nutrients provided by prenatal vitamins. Prenatal vitamins are specially formulated multivitamins that can help avoid any nutritional deficiencies in the diet consumed by pregnant women. While most prenatal vitamins contain numerous vitamins and minerals, folic acid is one of the most important ingredients.
Of course, you can get this key ingredient from natural sources like green leafy vegetables, beans, nuts and citrus fruits. However, if you have a very busy life then best is that you have a folic acid prenatal vitamin that you can take along with your diet.
Should know when buying a prenatal supplement that it should contain folic acid. If you are pregnant already then somewhere between 400 and 800 mcg is recommended per day. This would be apart from the amounts of folic acid that you probably get from your everyday diet. By now, your doctor must have already told you that folic acid is quite important during pregnancy.
Folic acid prenatal has proved to be helpful in reducing the amounts of birth defects in babies. Women having lower levels of folicacid in their blood are likely to give birth to premature infants, babies infected with spina bifida, limb defects, cleft palate, low weight birth babies and other defects.
Simply by taking folic acid prenatal, you can easily reduce the chances of giving birth to a baby with any defects. Studies show that if you take a larger dose, like up to 4,000 micrograms at least a month post or during the pregnancy first trimester then, this can be very beneficial.
Doctors recommend up to 400 mg of folic acid. In case you have delivered a baby with a neural tube defect then, this time you might consider taking prenatal vitamins in advance. As a neural tube defect would start to develop at about three weeks that is possibly the earliest, you can learn that you are pregnant. Chances are that the doctor would advise you to start taking the prenatal vitamins from the very first check up in case you have not started taking them.
Folic acid is required for the creation and the maintenance of RNA and DNA. Thus, it is an important part of the nutrients that are required during the intensive procedure of the pregnancy period. It also provides help with the formation of red blood cells to help prevent the condition of anemia and provides aid for the production of serotonin and epinephrine. It also helps in keeping compound homocysteine from going too high in blood levels.
