"pregnancy" news and stories

Remember all the hype surrounding Beyonce and her occasional detox diet?

It's now officially being referred to as the Def Jam Diet. For some reason, everyone associated with the record label is drastically dropping pounds. However, now that Beyonce's (supposedly) pregnant, she can't do drop the pounds with the extreme dieting. (Well, duh, Beyonce, you're gaining weight because you're pregnant.)

There's been question about what exactly the Def Jam Diet is (because it seems to be working for the likes of Jay-Z, LA Reid, and Mariah Carey. Now everyone can breathe easily because the Def Jam Diet "is just the hip rapper way to say Master Cleanse."

Oh. Yeah, anything is more hip than saying you drink nothing but some strange concoction of lemonade, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper.

[via Huffington Post, via NY Post]

Wonder what foods those amazing, incredible, ever-so-unreachable celebs crave during their pregnancies?

The same things everyone else does, duh.

Apparently, Angelina Jolie, who is rumoured to be pregnant with twins, has been eating, well, like a pregnant woman. At a recent dinner outing with Baby-Daddy Brad Pitt, she ate: penne arrabiata, two starters, several rolls, profiteroles for dessert, and took an apple pie to go. Earlier during her pregnancy, she Angelina craved mustard-smothered onion rings and cinnamon chilli chocolates, and has since been eating cupcakes made by her kids.

I bet I could eat all of that - onions rings included - and I'm not even pregnant!

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The old story was that expectant mothers should eat fish to help their growing babies' brains. Then we heard that eating fish was dangerous to the health of the baby. If you're pregnant, no fish!

Well let it be known that once again, fish is good for your baby when you're pregnant!

Obviously, fish was never really bad for expectant mothers; it was simply that some certain types of fish that had high levels of mercury. All the news about "fish," "mercury," and "pregnancy" must have been confusing. The most recent research doesn't seem to sound like anything new, just a reminder that fish is, in fact, good for the brain, as "Preschoolers whose mothers regularly ate low-mercury fish during pregnancy may have sharper minds than their peers...Researchers found that among 341 3-year-olds, those whose mothers ate more than two servings of fish per week during pregnancy generally performed better on tests of verbal, visual and motor development."

Just remember that it's fish with low levels of mercury, so make sure you do your homework.

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Researchers from Exeter and Oxford U asked 740 pregnant women (all first-time moms) to keep a food diary during their gestation periods.

Their findings? That women who ate more food and more nutrients were 24% more likely to give birth to a boy (specifically, 56% of the women in the group who ate the most gave birth to boys). The average woman who gave birth to a male consumed 2,413 calories a day and ate foods containing potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. The odds of having a boy were also higher among women who consumed one bowl of cereal every day (though the researchers didn't specify whether the bowl was eaten at breakfast or not).

But some people are wary of the stats, saying that a man's sperm ultimately decides whether a child will be male or female, and that diet has little or nothing to do with it.

If anything, hopefully the study will remind and encourage pregnant women to eat a healthy, well-balanced meal no matter what sex their baby turns out to be.

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Recently, the news has been full of reports about the dangerous levels of mercury found in fish. For women in their childbearing years, this news is very concerning, especially coupled with reports that came out last year about how the oils in fish were really good for fetus development. So, do you eat fish or cut it out?

Luckily, there's web site that wants to help you make some sense out of the issue, at least when it comes to tuna fish. Simply punch your weight into the Tuna Calculator and it will give you a recommended weekly amount of tuna that you can safely consume. What will they think of next!

[via Parent Dish]

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