A meat-free pregnancy: how to be a healthy vegetarian through the most important 9 months of your life--and what to tell your mother-in-law.(health: ECOBEAUTY)

Publication: Vegetarian Times

Publication Date: 01-APR-06

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I was just a couple of months pregnant when the questions started. My meat-and-potatoes mother-in-law would ask her son hopefully, "Has she started eating meat again?" Each time he'd laugh and say, "No." I chose vegetarianism for health and ethical reasons 10 years before I got pregnant, so I knew I wouldn't go back.

My mother-in-law was worried because pregnancy puts enormous nutritional demands on a woman's body, and it's a common misconception that those demands can't be met as easily with a vegetarian diet. "A mother's vegetarianism has absolutely no negative effects on her baby," says former obstetrician Holly Roberts, DO, author of Your Vegetarian Pregnancy. Science says the same: "The source of dietary protein does not seem to affect birth weight," reported a groundbreaking study involving the vegan members of a Tennessee commune, published in Southern Medical Journal in 1987.

"Usually vegetarians gain a little less weight during pregnancy," Roberts adds, "and because...

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