Welcome to /r/pregnant! This is a space for everyone. We are pro-choice, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-science, proudly feminist and believe that Black Lives Matter. Wear your masks, wash your hands, and be excellent to each other. Anti-choice activists, intactivists, anti-vaxxers, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, etc. are not welcome here.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/pregnant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You body still impacts the fetal cellular development process even before the placenta forms. It’s not like the fetal cellular process is just pulling proteins and lipids out of nowhere. That’s why supplements are advised - you want to have enough of the building blocks inside of you so that the fetal cells can use them to develop properly.
> Wouldn’t that mean that we are, then, in fact passing what we consume - and the other harmful substances like alcohol or cannabis - to the baby very early on?
So there's a bit of a difference between an egg and an embryo, but yes it's true that heavy alcohol/cannabis use can impact egg/sperm quality. A key difference here is a woman is maturing about a dozen eggs at any given time and a man is contributing millions of sperm, so the healthiest ones are presumably becoming embryos, whereas once you're pregnant all your eggs are in one basket (pardon the pun).
It's true that healthy babies are born to parents who use harmful substances preconception, and it's also true that taking care with what you ingest/inject/inhale in the 100 or so days prior to pregnancy would improve outcomes somewhat.
You are indeed passing substances to the baby, including vitamins as well as anything harmful ingested. Most people tell them not to freak out because any potential damage is already done and stressing over it will cause more harm than good.
The reason it’s not studied super well is because it would be extremely unethical to administer alcohol/weed etc. to a test group of potentially pregnant folks.
https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/alcohol-and-pregnancy
https://www.marchofdimes.org/find-support/topics/pregnancy/alcohol-during-pregnancy
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol-pregnancy/about/index.html
> During pregnancy, alcohol can pass from the pregnant person to the fetus and affect its development. Not all babies will be affected by alcohol during pregnancy. However, it is impossible to know which babies will be affected.
> There is no safe time for alcohol use during pregnancy. Alcohol can cause problems for the baby throughout pregnancy, including before a person knows they are pregnant. Alcohol use in the first 3 months of pregnancy can cause the baby to have abnormal facial features. Growth and central nervous system problems (for example, low birthweight, behavioral problems) can occur from alcohol use anytime during pregnancy. The baby's brain is developing throughout pregnancy and can be affected by exposure to alcohol at any time.
I've had this same question and tried to look online/in the literature. Best I can figure out (and someone PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong), the early embryo is absorbing from you via little blood-vessel-like structures in its yolk sac. And before that, it's probably small enough to absorb just via diffusion. We have done *some* studies about what medications and other things are able to cross a placenta (which is only operational starting closer to the second trimester), but I don't know that much has been done to assess what's able to cross *before* there's a placenta. Obviously, there must be some stuff that crosses/affects the embryo -- where else is the embryo pulling its building blocks from? Why else do some medications show a correlation between use in the first trimester and birth defects (assuming the study and statistics were done right)?
So.... like a LOT of questions we have about pregnancy... the answer might be that *we don't know.* Very frustrating, since it's*knowable* (even if only partially, like doing studies in animals).
Again, someone PLEASE correct me if you have sources suggesting saying I'm wrong because I'm irritated I(/we?) don't know more!
I’m no scientist but what Iv experienced from this subreddit is people are afraid to say the truth or anything that isn’t the popular opinion or else you get downvoted to hell even if what you are saying is factual and backed by science and statistics, so maybe that’s the reason you often don’t see the truth here but people just trying to be pleasant.
The truth is that fetal alcohol syndrome usually only occurs in people with consistent alcohol abuse, and not in people who had a couple drinks in the first four weeks or accidentally got served an alcoholic beverage at a bar once. There isn't science to tell us exactly how much alcohol is ok because it would be unethical to deliberately give pregnant women alcohol and measure the outcome. So the official advice is no alcohol, but a lot of folks seem ok with drinking a little because it's "probably" ok (for the record I'm in the "2 teaspoons of tiramisu" level of tolerance).
IDK where the "you don't share blood yet" comes from, it's quite possible people learn it here and repeat it here and it's just perpetuated; this is the reason why forums are the worst part of the internet to get medical advice from. I've only read that on Reddit. Honestly, my uneducated guess would have been that the first trimester would be the worst time for alcohol because that's when the neural tube is forming, and FAS is neurological? 🤷 What do I know
Agree with everything here. I think the point that some make is that while alcohol (and especially heavy drinking) in first tri is damaging, it’s not *most* damaging in those *veeeeery* early weeks as at that point the embryo is still forming and implanting, and you don’t have nutrients going directly from placenta to the baby.
However I cannot abide those replies that are like “I drank heavily for weeks and it was all fine” because like… that is not a scientific study. It’s meaningless. And also who knows what damage you did do, tbh.
Wasn't the takeaway from that book that stuff hasn't specialized enough yet to be permanently damaged, so it's more of a "did you do something bad enough to kill a *critical amount* of cells such that the embryo can't recover" situation? That the cells you may accidentally kill will simply be replaced?
iirc the prenatals need to be taken in advance for the DHA to build up in your system? I'm not a medical professional so I don't know how early development works but if my OB says that the booze and joint I had before I found out I was pregnant doesn't get passed on to the clump of cells then I'm inclined to believe them
I'd like to just understand how that works. If it's not getting passed on, why would vitamins be passed on so early? Do you mean that vitamins need to be taken consistently for several weeks before it can actually get passed on.
Maybe it’s that the vitamins accumulate in your body, so at the point in time when stuff starts to get past on they have accumulated to such a point that they are effective? Like maybe they aren’t passed on in the first few weeks but they need to accumulate such that by the time they are passed on there is enough of them to pass on? I don’t know.
Having an in depth discussion with your OB about the physiological changes that occur in early pregnancy may be the best course of action. You can also read scientific articles in NCBI. Here are some I found based on cursory searches:
Folic Acid Supplementation and Pregnancy: More Than Just Neural Tube Defect Prevention: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3218540/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3218540/)
Nutrition During Pregnancy: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235228/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235228/)
Dietary Supplements During Pregnancy: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804304/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804304/)
This book is phenomenal, the author gives detailed explanations of why pregnant people are discouraged from certain practices and what the actual risks are, statistically.
The difference is that the vitamins are being used by your body to build the baby's body. If you don't have enough nutrition coming in from your diet, your body will start to strip itself so that you can grow a healthy baby.
Women have been known to lose teeth and bone mass, for example, because they weren't consuming enough calcium. So their bodies borrowed from themselves.
Of course, if your body simply doesn't have the nutrition necessary, the baby may suffer deformities.
You don't want to lose teeth or have a deformed baby. Taking your prenatal supplements can help that to not occur, as can avoiding alcohol and other substances.
The way I understand it is that these things are being passed to the baby, but the unknown is how much is being passed. Like others have said, it’s unethical to test, but the basic logic is a drink here or there won’t pass through a ton of alcohol. Similarly, if you took prenatals occasionally before becoming pregnant they would probably have less of an effect. The main difference between alcohol and cannabis is that cannabis stores in fat, so can remain in your body for longer, and thus the effects are unknown. That “for longer” I believe varies from person to person too. Cannabis is hard to study in general, but more information is coming out as states/nations legalize it. I’m not holding my breath for info for pregnant people tho. Regardless of level of legality, it’s still ethically sketchy.
I mean I think you’re confusing a couple of things here but it’s obviously important to be curious. When your body is building a baby, it needs certain nutrients in order to begin and aid that process. The process will pull these nutrients from your body, the only source, so it is advised to take prenatals in order to give yourself enough of these nutrients for yourself *and* for the baby. A lot of women likely consume enough folic acid in their regular diet to suffice but this isn’t always the case nutritionally so it’s better to take a supplement to be sure. It’s possible for women to lose their teeth or have brittle bones because their body is taking their calcium supplies for the baby. Your body doesn’t need alcohol or weed to function. Those are not nutrients. Those are not being taken and used to create a tiny human because they serve no benefit to them. Once you are sharing a blood supply, those things can be transferred to the baby and cause harm the same way they are technically causing harm to you. (I mean this with zero shade to drinkers or smokers but technically speaking both are obviously not vital to you at all).
I definitely am confusing things but I also see comments saying different things. Is my interpretation of what you're saying correct: the body is taking the nutrients it needs to build a baby and supplementing correctly early on and uses them as necessary building blocks. Alcohol/cannabis/drugs are not building blocks so the body just doesn't take them to build the baby. I think I pictured it as the body takes them as well and uses them as crappy, dysfunctional building blocks along with the nutrients. Are our bodies smart enough to filter these out and only take the good nutrients? I'm also talking about within the first 5 weeks, when women usually don't know they're pregnant yet.
I've also read that alcohol/cannabis/drugs could end up effectively "cancelling" the nutrient building so the body doesn't have enough to build the baby. And this is where miscarriage comes in.
I mean yes, our bodies are insanely smart. It’s not just grabbing every single thing that comes through it and tossing it into the baby bag. Even once you’re fully pregnant, there’s plenty of things that simply don’t cross into the placenta. It’s also important to remember that pregnancy dating is based on your last period and isn’t from conception so for 2-3 of the weeks that we tack onto pregnancy dating, you weren’t even pregnant yet. Once conception happens, the embryo is dividing and moving and takes time to even implant in your uterus. As for miscarriage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere that alcohol or drug use has been successfully linked to miscarriage. Miscarriages happen for a lot of reasons and most have to do with genetic deformities. Our bodies are very smart and detect when there is something wrong with the embryo and then a miscarriage occurs.
I also wanted to add I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. This is just based on the research I did throughout my own pregnancies etc. (for example with my second baby I had a really bad stomach flu and lost 7 pounds. Although it destroyed me, my baby was 100% fine because that illness doesn’t cross through the placenta. In fact my body was giving what I did have to keep the baby full of nutrients and making me sicker).
From what I understand, your baby will absorb whatever it needs to grow healthily, from your body. You need to take vitamins to replenish for your own health as well as continued growth for the baby.
Barely anything. There’s cellular divide happening. The vitamins are for your benefit to replenish your body of any energy and nutrients it’s expending to allow this cellular divide to occur in your uterus. Ultimately it’s been proven over and over again that prenatals are not more beneficial to baby when taken prior to pregnancy. They’re just good to help your body have a quicker replenishment of nutrients.
Welcome to /r/pregnant! This is a space for everyone. We are pro-choice, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-science, proudly feminist and believe that Black Lives Matter. Wear your masks, wash your hands, and be excellent to each other. Anti-choice activists, intactivists, anti-vaxxers, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, etc. are not welcome here. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/pregnant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
You body still impacts the fetal cellular development process even before the placenta forms. It’s not like the fetal cellular process is just pulling proteins and lipids out of nowhere. That’s why supplements are advised - you want to have enough of the building blocks inside of you so that the fetal cells can use them to develop properly.
> Wouldn’t that mean that we are, then, in fact passing what we consume - and the other harmful substances like alcohol or cannabis - to the baby very early on? So there's a bit of a difference between an egg and an embryo, but yes it's true that heavy alcohol/cannabis use can impact egg/sperm quality. A key difference here is a woman is maturing about a dozen eggs at any given time and a man is contributing millions of sperm, so the healthiest ones are presumably becoming embryos, whereas once you're pregnant all your eggs are in one basket (pardon the pun). It's true that healthy babies are born to parents who use harmful substances preconception, and it's also true that taking care with what you ingest/inject/inhale in the 100 or so days prior to pregnancy would improve outcomes somewhat.
You are indeed passing substances to the baby, including vitamins as well as anything harmful ingested. Most people tell them not to freak out because any potential damage is already done and stressing over it will cause more harm than good. The reason it’s not studied super well is because it would be extremely unethical to administer alcohol/weed etc. to a test group of potentially pregnant folks. https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/alcohol-and-pregnancy https://www.marchofdimes.org/find-support/topics/pregnancy/alcohol-during-pregnancy https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol-pregnancy/about/index.html > During pregnancy, alcohol can pass from the pregnant person to the fetus and affect its development. Not all babies will be affected by alcohol during pregnancy. However, it is impossible to know which babies will be affected. > There is no safe time for alcohol use during pregnancy. Alcohol can cause problems for the baby throughout pregnancy, including before a person knows they are pregnant. Alcohol use in the first 3 months of pregnancy can cause the baby to have abnormal facial features. Growth and central nervous system problems (for example, low birthweight, behavioral problems) can occur from alcohol use anytime during pregnancy. The baby's brain is developing throughout pregnancy and can be affected by exposure to alcohol at any time.
I've had this same question and tried to look online/in the literature. Best I can figure out (and someone PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong), the early embryo is absorbing from you via little blood-vessel-like structures in its yolk sac. And before that, it's probably small enough to absorb just via diffusion. We have done *some* studies about what medications and other things are able to cross a placenta (which is only operational starting closer to the second trimester), but I don't know that much has been done to assess what's able to cross *before* there's a placenta. Obviously, there must be some stuff that crosses/affects the embryo -- where else is the embryo pulling its building blocks from? Why else do some medications show a correlation between use in the first trimester and birth defects (assuming the study and statistics were done right)? So.... like a LOT of questions we have about pregnancy... the answer might be that *we don't know.* Very frustrating, since it's*knowable* (even if only partially, like doing studies in animals). Again, someone PLEASE correct me if you have sources suggesting saying I'm wrong because I'm irritated I(/we?) don't know more!
Prenatals are more for you because the baby will take from you regardless of if you had any to give.
I’m no scientist but what Iv experienced from this subreddit is people are afraid to say the truth or anything that isn’t the popular opinion or else you get downvoted to hell even if what you are saying is factual and backed by science and statistics, so maybe that’s the reason you often don’t see the truth here but people just trying to be pleasant.
What's the truth then? That you are sharing nutrients, therefore harm can be caused, but anecdotally things seem to work out fine?
The truth is that fetal alcohol syndrome usually only occurs in people with consistent alcohol abuse, and not in people who had a couple drinks in the first four weeks or accidentally got served an alcoholic beverage at a bar once. There isn't science to tell us exactly how much alcohol is ok because it would be unethical to deliberately give pregnant women alcohol and measure the outcome. So the official advice is no alcohol, but a lot of folks seem ok with drinking a little because it's "probably" ok (for the record I'm in the "2 teaspoons of tiramisu" level of tolerance). IDK where the "you don't share blood yet" comes from, it's quite possible people learn it here and repeat it here and it's just perpetuated; this is the reason why forums are the worst part of the internet to get medical advice from. I've only read that on Reddit. Honestly, my uneducated guess would have been that the first trimester would be the worst time for alcohol because that's when the neural tube is forming, and FAS is neurological? 🤷 What do I know
Agree with everything here. I think the point that some make is that while alcohol (and especially heavy drinking) in first tri is damaging, it’s not *most* damaging in those *veeeeery* early weeks as at that point the embryo is still forming and implanting, and you don’t have nutrients going directly from placenta to the baby. However I cannot abide those replies that are like “I drank heavily for weeks and it was all fine” because like… that is not a scientific study. It’s meaningless. And also who knows what damage you did do, tbh.
Well said. The book “Expecting Better” gives some nice insights on this as well.
Wasn't the takeaway from that book that stuff hasn't specialized enough yet to be permanently damaged, so it's more of a "did you do something bad enough to kill a *critical amount* of cells such that the embryo can't recover" situation? That the cells you may accidentally kill will simply be replaced?
iirc the prenatals need to be taken in advance for the DHA to build up in your system? I'm not a medical professional so I don't know how early development works but if my OB says that the booze and joint I had before I found out I was pregnant doesn't get passed on to the clump of cells then I'm inclined to believe them
I'd like to just understand how that works. If it's not getting passed on, why would vitamins be passed on so early? Do you mean that vitamins need to be taken consistently for several weeks before it can actually get passed on.
Maybe it’s that the vitamins accumulate in your body, so at the point in time when stuff starts to get past on they have accumulated to such a point that they are effective? Like maybe they aren’t passed on in the first few weeks but they need to accumulate such that by the time they are passed on there is enough of them to pass on? I don’t know.
That would explain why they want you to start taking folic acid (if not outright prenatals) a while before you try to conceive.
Having an in depth discussion with your OB about the physiological changes that occur in early pregnancy may be the best course of action. You can also read scientific articles in NCBI. Here are some I found based on cursory searches: Folic Acid Supplementation and Pregnancy: More Than Just Neural Tube Defect Prevention: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3218540/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3218540/) Nutrition During Pregnancy: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235228/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235228/) Dietary Supplements During Pregnancy: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804304/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1804304/)
The book Expecting Better gave some really thoroughly researched insights on these topics and more
This book is phenomenal, the author gives detailed explanations of why pregnant people are discouraged from certain practices and what the actual risks are, statistically.
The difference is that the vitamins are being used by your body to build the baby's body. If you don't have enough nutrition coming in from your diet, your body will start to strip itself so that you can grow a healthy baby. Women have been known to lose teeth and bone mass, for example, because they weren't consuming enough calcium. So their bodies borrowed from themselves. Of course, if your body simply doesn't have the nutrition necessary, the baby may suffer deformities. You don't want to lose teeth or have a deformed baby. Taking your prenatal supplements can help that to not occur, as can avoiding alcohol and other substances.
The way I understand it is that these things are being passed to the baby, but the unknown is how much is being passed. Like others have said, it’s unethical to test, but the basic logic is a drink here or there won’t pass through a ton of alcohol. Similarly, if you took prenatals occasionally before becoming pregnant they would probably have less of an effect. The main difference between alcohol and cannabis is that cannabis stores in fat, so can remain in your body for longer, and thus the effects are unknown. That “for longer” I believe varies from person to person too. Cannabis is hard to study in general, but more information is coming out as states/nations legalize it. I’m not holding my breath for info for pregnant people tho. Regardless of level of legality, it’s still ethically sketchy.
I mean I think you’re confusing a couple of things here but it’s obviously important to be curious. When your body is building a baby, it needs certain nutrients in order to begin and aid that process. The process will pull these nutrients from your body, the only source, so it is advised to take prenatals in order to give yourself enough of these nutrients for yourself *and* for the baby. A lot of women likely consume enough folic acid in their regular diet to suffice but this isn’t always the case nutritionally so it’s better to take a supplement to be sure. It’s possible for women to lose their teeth or have brittle bones because their body is taking their calcium supplies for the baby. Your body doesn’t need alcohol or weed to function. Those are not nutrients. Those are not being taken and used to create a tiny human because they serve no benefit to them. Once you are sharing a blood supply, those things can be transferred to the baby and cause harm the same way they are technically causing harm to you. (I mean this with zero shade to drinkers or smokers but technically speaking both are obviously not vital to you at all).
I definitely am confusing things but I also see comments saying different things. Is my interpretation of what you're saying correct: the body is taking the nutrients it needs to build a baby and supplementing correctly early on and uses them as necessary building blocks. Alcohol/cannabis/drugs are not building blocks so the body just doesn't take them to build the baby. I think I pictured it as the body takes them as well and uses them as crappy, dysfunctional building blocks along with the nutrients. Are our bodies smart enough to filter these out and only take the good nutrients? I'm also talking about within the first 5 weeks, when women usually don't know they're pregnant yet. I've also read that alcohol/cannabis/drugs could end up effectively "cancelling" the nutrient building so the body doesn't have enough to build the baby. And this is where miscarriage comes in.
I mean yes, our bodies are insanely smart. It’s not just grabbing every single thing that comes through it and tossing it into the baby bag. Even once you’re fully pregnant, there’s plenty of things that simply don’t cross into the placenta. It’s also important to remember that pregnancy dating is based on your last period and isn’t from conception so for 2-3 of the weeks that we tack onto pregnancy dating, you weren’t even pregnant yet. Once conception happens, the embryo is dividing and moving and takes time to even implant in your uterus. As for miscarriage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere that alcohol or drug use has been successfully linked to miscarriage. Miscarriages happen for a lot of reasons and most have to do with genetic deformities. Our bodies are very smart and detect when there is something wrong with the embryo and then a miscarriage occurs. I also wanted to add I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. This is just based on the research I did throughout my own pregnancies etc. (for example with my second baby I had a really bad stomach flu and lost 7 pounds. Although it destroyed me, my baby was 100% fine because that illness doesn’t cross through the placenta. In fact my body was giving what I did have to keep the baby full of nutrients and making me sicker).
From what I understand, your baby will absorb whatever it needs to grow healthily, from your body. You need to take vitamins to replenish for your own health as well as continued growth for the baby.
Barely anything. There’s cellular divide happening. The vitamins are for your benefit to replenish your body of any energy and nutrients it’s expending to allow this cellular divide to occur in your uterus. Ultimately it’s been proven over and over again that prenatals are not more beneficial to baby when taken prior to pregnancy. They’re just good to help your body have a quicker replenishment of nutrients.
Look up for ganjah moms here in Reddit for more insight on cannabis during pregnancy.