Eating well in pregnancy

Eating well is essential for women who may become pregnant. Good nutrition pre-conception is linked to fertility and optimum development in the first few weeks of life.

Eating well during pregnancy ensures a healthy pregnancy and a reduction in risks and health complications associated with giving birth. Most importantly, it is now well established that how a mother eats during pregnancy can impact on the long term health and well-being of her child, and a better nourished population helps everyone to reach their full potential. Here you can find out about what good nutrition means for pregnant women, find out more about the Healthy Start and Best Start Foods schemes and find links to a number of other organisations and support groups.

Eating well for a healthy pregnancy
A practical guide

This guide aims to enable health professionals to support pregnant women understand their food and nutrition needs in pregnancy. It includes recipes and meal ideas and can sit alongside other local public health guidance to provide a practical explanation of what ‘eating well’ looks like. It also includes information about vitamin and nutrient requirements and which supplements are suitable for pregnant women.

As with all our resources the information is in line with current policy and has been reviewed by experts in the field.

Eating well in pregnancy
A practical guide to support teenagers

This guide provides information and support about eating well in pregnancy for women aged 15 - 19 years. 

It provides general advice on food and nutrition and ideas for how young women can eat throughout the day and manage their increased energy and nutrient needs.

Part 1 of this guide gives background information on what eating well is all about for pregnant women.

Part 2 provides photos with recipes that show how the eating well advice can be put into practice and example days for teenage mums to be to show how they might eat across the day.

This report is open access. This means you can use any sections of it in your own work to support young pregnant women, with acknowledgement to First Steps Nutrition Trust. The whole report may be most useful as a reference document and you might want shorter sections to use when you work with young women.

Eating well in pregnancy
A recipe guide for teenagers

This simple recipe guide provides ideas for recipes to encourage young women to cook and eat a range of food in pregnancy. The resource can be used directly with young women and pages can be copied with suggested meal and snack ideas for those who work with young women and their families. 

There is no hard copy available of this resource, but a local printer could produce copies from the pdf if needed.