Essential Fatty Acids:What Your Baby Wants You To Know

Benefits of Essential Fatty Acids for Your Baby

• Help Support a healthy, full-term pregnancy and birth weight.
• Help your baby’s brain and eye development.
• Help enrich the quality of breast milk for nursing infants.

Benefits of Essential Fatty Acids for You

• Help reduce risk factors for heart disease, stroke, and osteoporosis.  
• Help maintain vitality of hair and skin.
• May help reduce the “baby blues.”

Essential Fatty Acids: For the Life and Health of You Baby and You
     Essential fatty acids, also known as EFA’s are necessary for good health and for the prevention of disease in women and their children. For you, this is true during pregnancy and later in life. For your baby, the EFA’s you take benefit her while she’s in the womb and throughout her life.

EFAs Help Your Baby Develop Before Birth

            Essential fatty acids play an important role during pregnancy, when your baby’s cells, tissues, and organs are developing at a remarkably rapid rate. An adequate supply of EFAs during these formative months is essential for normal growth. EFAs are critical building blocks for your baby’s neurological and cognitive development.

Benefits of Breastfeeding

Breast milk provides your baby with one of the richest dietary sources of omega-3 essential fatty acids. Infants who are fed EFAs demonstrate enhanced visual, neurological, and cognitive development. These benefits, associated with an EFA-rich diet during infancy, carry over into adulthood. Adding EFA supplements to your diet helps improve the nutritional quality of your breast milk and helps ensure your baby receives an adequate supply of EFAs in infancy, when brain development is most critical.  

After Delivery: EFAs Help you Feel Like Yourself Again

Your entire body works to support your baby’s health for the nine months you are pregnant and while you are breastfeeding. During this time, your stories of vital EFAs are depleted, and so it’s no wonder you feel depleted too. EFAs help keep your hair thick and soft, your fingernails strong, and your skin glowing. By maintaining your body’s supply of EFAs both during and after pregnancy, you can greatly reduce the physical effects that often follow delivery – thinner hair, brittle nails, and the loss of pregnancy “glow.”  

EFAs Can Keep the “Baby Blues” at Bay

EFAs may also help keep you from feeling depressed after the baby comes. Studies show that women who have low levels of EFAs are more likely to suffer from postpartum depression than other women. Because it can take up to six months for the body to replenish its stores of EFAs after pregnancy, and even longer if you’re breastfeeding, it can feel like those baby blues are going on and on. But they don’t have to, good nutrition can help. Eating more fish like tuna, salmon, and mackerel can help restore you body’s EFAs. However, that can be hard to do everyday.

For Life: Protecting Women Against Cardiovascular Disease … and More

Omega-3 fatty acids are not only essential for your reproductive health, but have also been shown to contribute to long-term cardiovascular health as well. By helping to moderate blood pressure and maintain a healthy cardiovascular system, omega-3 fatty acids reduce risk factors associated with heart disease – the number one cause of death among women in the U.S.

Based upon extensive medical research, the American Heart Association has issued dietary guidelines calling for increased consumption of these important omega-3 fatty acids.

Additional research suggests a beneficial role for EFA’s in preventing osteoporosis – a significant cause of disability among women. Increased consumption of these essential fats has been shown to enhance calcium absorption, decrease its elimination from the body and improve bone strength.

Cardiovascular Benefits of Essential Fatty Acids

• Promotes a healthy balance of HDL/LDL cholesterol.
• Helps lower triglycerides.
• Helps to maintain healthy blood vessels, reducing the risk of blood clots.
• Contributes to maintenance of healthy blood pressure, important to reducing the risk of coronary artery disease.
• Assists in reducing risk factors for heart attack and stroke. 
  
  The Evidence Continues to Grow

            Scientists continue to investigate the role of EFAs in both health and disease. Preliminary evidence links omega-3 fatty acid nutrition to a number of conditions that affect women, children, and men. These include:

• Alzheimer’s disease
• Asthma
• ADHD
• Certain types of cancer
• Depression
• Diabetes
• Rheumatoid arthritis 
  
  Additional research will likely serve to expand the list of potential health benefits associated with increased intake of essential fatty acids.

  Getting the Right Amount of the Right EFAs
  
      The National Institutes of Health recommends 300 mg of DHA daily for women who are pregnant or nursing. In the US, the average woman consumes only 54 mg per day, which is 82% less than the recommended levels. Getting the right amount of the right essential fatty acids can be a challenge.

  Food Sources rich in Omega-3 Essential Fatty Acids include:
  
  Fish: Cold-water fish like salmon, tuna, sardines, mackerel, and herring
  
  Plants: Oils including canola, soy, flaxseed, and black currant seed. Walnuts and pumpkin seeds
  
  Meat: Venison and buffalo
  
  Enhanced Food: Omega-3 enriched eggs and come specialty breads

Infinite Health Resources does not at any point, for any circumstances suggest that you do not follow or stop medical advice of your physician. We do not advocate any drugs that has not been prescribed by your physician, nor suggest that we are medical doctors nor are we giving medical advice. Infinite Health Resources is here purely as a resource.