So Kate Miller says, "I'm planning on getting pregnant in the next 1.5 years.
What length of time preconception should I take a prenatal seeking health without iron. Should
I start now in alternate months with a normal multivitamin? What kinds of nutritional status
tests should I get preconception as somebody who doesn't have anything obviously wrong going on?"
Well, so I would number one look at as soon as you know you're going to clearly be getting
pregnant in a year and a half, institute the prenatal conception. And the reason is
we hadn't really studied like what's the difference between giving it three months before,
versus six months before, or whether it was 12 months before. And so I don't see any harm
for implementing the prenatal protocol a year and a half ahead of time. But as you know,
many people get accidentally pregnant. And so we may be planning on the year and a half from now,
but you might accidentally get pregnant six months from now. So if you are already in
the mode of thinking about preparing, then I think it's time to just start preparing.
Now, I think one thing that would be worth doing, would be to do a dietary analysis of your usual
diet and the diet that you expect to be eating during the time leading up to the pregnancy.
And do like a chronometer micronutrient analysis on at least a few different representative days.
And either ignore their targets or alter their targets to be pregnancy targets.
And I would recommend going through the vitamins and minerals 101 course and look at the how much
do we need section. And see where I made notes about pregnancy targets in general.
I've accepted the RDA for pregnancy targets, but I believe there are a couple of cases where I've
suggested a different target for pregnancy. So you might want to cross reference the RGAs with what
I put in the vitamins and minerals 101 course. Look, I personally recommend using my target,
because that's why I put it there. But see how your diet matches them. And I would look at your
iron status too. I would look at your ferritin and your transparent saturation or iron saturation,
because I'm not sure why you're using the vitamin no iron. But you definitely don't want
to be anywhere near iron deficiency when you get pregnant, because that could compromise the
longterm. Being iron deficient during pregnancy and lactation via the diet
the iron deficient diet, can have very lasting consequences on cognitive skills
and mental performance, and IQ for the child. And so I think taking preconception the prenatal
without iron is fine, if your iron status is fine, but I think that you want to know that your iron
status is fine if that's your approach, because the need for iron goes up a lot in pregnancy.
What other kinds of nutritional status testing? Well, I think across the board, it would be best
to know that you're in good nutritional status. But the things that sort of stick out to me, are
you don't want to be Vitamin A deficient or Vitamin A toxic, so you're right in the middle
of the range. That would be the best thing. You really don't want to be deficient in anything.
But some of the things that stick out are obviously everyone knows about folic iron which is
really important, but there's not really a good nutritional status test for choline. Biotin is
very important. One third of mothers spontaneously become biotin deficient from pregnancy. And so
I think that you want to be at least getting the RGA for biotin. DUS test of biotin status, is
beta-hydroxyisovaleric acid, which is found on a blood panel but it is kind of pricey, but is
the best. I don't consider it a complete nutritional status testing panel, but it's
the one large panel that has the most markers I would look for. And so, yeah, I think all of the
nutrients are important, but I would single out those as being the most important to look at.