Worst Foods to Eat While Pregnant

Your unborn baby’s overall wellbeing depends on your diet, so everything you put into your mouth should be healthy. Processed foods, aspartame, and industrially raised meat and poultry are some of worst foods to eat while pregnant as they put your baby at risk for a host of health problems.

Don’t Eat Processed Foods When You’re Pregnant

Foods are always healthiest when you eat them in their natural form. Processed foods are not good for you because they are filled with unhealthy additives like trans fat, sugar, and excessive amounts of salt.

Some examples of processed foods include:

• fish sticks
• chicken nuggets
• canned goods
• lunch meats
• bologna
• pasteurized milk
• cookies and cakes
• spam and other canned meats
• white flour
• frozen foods
• hot dogs

During pregnancy, sugar is absorbed into the bloodstream at a rapid pace. In order to regulate this sugar, your pancreas releases insulin. The more sugar you eat the harder your pancreas has to work to produce insulin. If your pancreas can’t keep pace with your body needs you can develop a condition known as gestational diabetes.

When you develop gestational diabetes, your baby may grow too large. This can cause serious complications during birth. Eating sugar during pregnancy can also cause you to gain an excessive amount of weight. This increases your risk of obesity-related illnesses like heart attacks and stroke.

The excessive amount of salt used to preserve processed foods can contribute to high blood pressure during pregnancy. This condition can narrow the vessels that provide essential nutrients and oxygen to the fetus. Suffering from hypertension while you’re pregnant can lead to placental abruption, preeclampsia, low birth weight, preterm delivery and slow fetal growth.

Trans fat is a man-made fat that is created by mixing hydrogen atoms with liquid vegetable oil. This type of fat is commonly found in processed baked goods, margarine and fried foods like French fries and chicken.

Trans fat raises bad cholesterol and reduces good cholesterol. This food additive also increases the risk of infertility and promotes immune dysfunction, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancer.

Industrially Raised Meat and Poultry

Industrially raised cattle, pigs and chickens are filled with growth hormones and antibiotics. The growth hormones are used to make the livestock grow larger. The antibiotics are used to control the diseases and infections that can result from the animals being kept in unsanitary conditions.

Industrial farmers add dead animal parts to the animal feed because it is an inexpensive way to provide their livestock with protein. The chemicals farmers pump into the livestock gets into the food you eat and can make your unborn baby vulnerable to health problems.

Aspartame

Consuming aspartame during pregnancy can carry a number of health risks for you and your unborn baby. This artificial sweetener has been linked to a several neuropsychiatric disorders. Some of them include:

• mood swings
• panic attacks
• hearing loss
• vision problems
• manic episodes
• migraines
• headaches
• seizures
• depression
• anxiety attacks
• numbness
• vertigo
• heart palpitations
• visual hallucinations

Aspartame has been shown to trigger or exacerbate chronic fatigue syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, lymphoma and mental retardation. The more aspartame you eat, the more you crave. This can increase the demand on your pancreas to produce more insulin, and result in unwanted weight gain and diabetes.

Your baby relies on you to make smart food choices on his behalf. By eliminating processed foods, aspartame and industrially raise meats and poultry, you can easily avoid some of the unsavory additives that can adversely affect your baby’s health.

Proper nutrition is the key to a healthy pregnancy. To learn about the best foods to eat while pregnant, visit http://www.whattoeatwhilepregnant.com/.

Bad Diets: 5 Worst Diet Plans of All Time

When it comes to losing weight, everyone has two things in common: they’re impatient to lose it, and once they do, they’re afraid they’ll gain the weight back. When it comes to losing the weight and keeping it off, you can save yourself a lot of time and money by avoiding the top five worst diets of all time.

1. Liquid Diets: There are some diets out there that claim that simply by spending a week drinking a patented juice bottle or a special tea, you can shed pounds like crazy and stop hunger pangs. The truth of the matter is that liquid diets allow you to simply starve yourself. Drinking so many liquids creates a temporary feeling of fullness, yes, but the drinks themselves contain little to no nutritional value. If you would like to supplement your meals with liquid nourishment, don’t choose ones that are advertised as being for diets. Instead, choose real fruit and vegetable juices to go with your meals.

2. Dieting pills: Dieting pills is where losing weight can become very dangerous indeed. Whether you choose vitamins, supplements, or simply capsules advertised as weight loss pills, you are running a risk. What many don’t realize about these items is that they are not FDA approved. This means that they can literally contain anything. Not only can this waste your time and money, but putting your trust in diet pills can actually make you sick if you’re not careful.

3. Any Diet That Touts Eating Solely One Food: It’s likely you’ve tried this kind before. You’ve had salad diets, grapefruit diets, diets that exclude meat, diets that are nothing but meat–what all of these diets have in common is that they are depriving you of food that you need to be healthy. Oftentimes they leave you hungry, weak, and miserable. As your body panics over the sudden lack, you begin craving intensely. Don’t deprive yourself. A nourishing, balanced diet will do more for helping you lose weight and feel healthier in the long run than living solely off of fruit salad will.

4. Diets That Boast Small Portions: While shrinking your portions is an essential part of almost any diet, avoid diets that serve exclusively small portions. Contrary to popular belief, being hungry all the time is not a sign that the diet is working. It merely increases your chances of binge eating later. By investing in diets that have sensible, balanced portions, you will be able to stick to the diet for much longer. Don’t restrict yourself, and don’t drive yourself crazy with charts, schedules, or calorie counting. In the long run it simply isn’t worth it.

5. Any Diet That Claims to Cause Unhealthy Weight Loss: Most doctors agree that losing about a pound a week over a gradual amount of time is the best way to lose weight and keep the weight off. Don’t trust diets that claim to be able to rid you of 30 pounds in a week, for example. Your body simply isn’t made for such abuse. It puts an enormous amount of stress on your body, which can have drastic results. Worse still, even if you do manage to lose the advertised amount of weight, it’s not unlikely that your metabolism will cause you to gain it all back.

When it comes to the top five worst diets of all time, the best way you can avoid them is to consult your doctor before going on any diet. He or she will be able to determine which diets are effective and which ones are scams. By choosing diets that are nourishing, sensible, and gradual, you will be doing your part to keep your weight at a good number while staying healthy at the same time.

Rick is a digital camera repair specialist at C.R.I.S. Camera Services in Chandler, Arizona. Mr. Valence is the webmaster of his Phoenix camera repair company and is often found documenting his latest camera repair observations here.