Many women gain too much weight in pregnancy. How can we help?
Harnessing what motivates pregnant women to gain only healthy amounts of weight could help fight the obesity epidemic on a global scale.
Pregnant women face a dilemma. Some need to gain weight (but not too much) while others should gain little, if any, during a time when the world seems to be urging them to eat for two. It’s no wonder they have trouble meeting the goals for weight gain during pregnancy recommended by what is now the National Academy of Medicine.
A study of more than 1.3 million pregnant women, in the Journal of the American Medical Associationshowed that 47 percent of them gained more weight than recommended by the guidelines.
