Choline and Pregnancy: Your Guide to an Essential Nutrient
Nutrition is a crucial part of health. Your body performs countless complex processes and tasks each day—and these require fuel. Ensuring your body gets the nutrients it needs is a vital part of, well, living.
When you’re pregnant, nutrition becomes a bit more complicated. After all, you’re no longer responsible for solely your nutrition—your developing child is also relying on you for the nutrients it needs.
While your body is working overtime with pregnancy, some nutrients become far more important than others. This is the case with choline, a chemical compound that naturally occurs in a number of food sources. Read on for a comprehensive breakdown of the role choline plays during pregnancy, the latest research on the subject, and more.
What is Choline
As mentioned above, choline is a naturally occurring chemical compound. There are two main ways your body gets choline: endogenous synthesis, which occurs in the liver, and through food. The choline that the body produces itself, however, is not plentiful enough to actually meet all of your needs. This means that choline is an essential nutrient for you to get from your food each day.
Choline plays a number of roles in the body, from helping maintain the structure of cell membranes to producing acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that aids the nervous system.
When you consume foods that contain choline, enzymes in your body work to separate free choline from other compounds. The free choline is then absorbed by the small intestine and stored in the liver, with endogenously produced choline, until it is distributed throughout the body for various uses.
Choline and Pregnancy
During pregnancy, choline becomes one of the most important nutrients in your diet. Adequate choline intake helps your child’s brain and spinal cord develop properly, protects against neural tube defects, and can help boost neurological function. Additionally, choline helps promote maternal health throughout pregnancy.
Researchers are still exploring the full scope of choline’s effects on prenatal development, with some studies looking at the long-term effects choline has on neurological development. In one study conducted by Cornell University, researchers found that the 7-year-old children of women who consumed elevated amounts of choline during pregnancy—twice the daily recommended amount, to be exact—exhibited more focus in performing a complex task than children in the control group. The control group in this study was the children of women who consumed the recommended daily amount of choline, which suggests the need to redefine the recommended amount for pregnant women.
Current intake guidelines for choline during pregnancy are based on liver function, not prenatal development. As such, ongoing research may lead to changes in the recommended daily intake of choline, especially for pregnant women.
How Much Choline Do You Need: Recommended Daily Intake
The amount of choline to include in your diet varies based on age, sex, and other factors. As of the time of writing, experts recommend that non-pregnant women over the age of 19 get 425 milligrams of choline each day. For pregnant women, that number jumps up to 450 milligrams and for breastfeeding women, 550 milligrams.
As discussed in the previous section, some studies have indicated that there are measurable benefits for pregnant women who consume up to twice the daily recommended amount—or 900 milligrams each day. Current research is continually pushing the boundaries of what we know about nutrition, so it’s best to stay informed and, as always, consult a doctor before making drastic dietary changes.
It is important to note that when it comes to choline, you can have too much of a good thing. But that upper limit comes way, way beyond even 900 milligrams per day. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the upper limit for choline consumption for adults is 3500 milligrams per day—more than eight times the daily recommended amount. And without overusing supplements, it would be difficult to actually reach those levels.
Sources of Choline
The body does not produce enough choline on its own, so it is crucial that you are eating choline-rich foods each day—especially during pregnancy. The list below shows some of the best sources of dietary choline according to the NIH:
- 3 oz beef liver: 356 milligrams
- 1 hard boiled egg: 147 milligrams
- ½ cup soybeans: 107 milligrams
- 3 oz roasted chicken breast: 72 milligrams
- 3 oz Atlantic cod: 71 milligrams
- 1 large red potato: 57 milligrams
- ½ cup canned kidney beans: 45 milligrams
Choline can also be found in lower concentrations in a wide variety of other foods including yogurt, broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, mushrooms, carrots, and fresh fruit. Ideally, you won’t need to rely on a single food to get all of your choline each day. Instead, by eating a well-balanced diet that hits each of the various food groups, you can get a little bit of choline from a wide variety of foods which will add up to your necessary daily intake.
During pregnancy, it can be difficult to get all of your choline from the foods that you eat. If this is the case, your doctor may recommend that you get some choline from a supplement. (It’s important to note that these supplements are not solely for pregnant individuals—anyone who feels they aren’t getting the necessary choline could take one.)
Choline Deficiency
In non-pregnant individuals, choline deficiency is pretty rare, but it does still occur. For pregnant individuals, choline deficiency is much more common. This is true for a number of reasons. First, pregnant women simply need more choline and it can be difficult to get enough from your diet. Additional factors, such as morning sickness, can further compound the issue. If you are struggling to keep food down, your body has less time to absorb nutrients from the food before it is vomited up.
During pregnancy, the benefits of choline can extend to your baby. Supporting brain and neural tube development. Needless to say, it is important to ensure you are getting enough choline each day during pregnancy.
Here’s the good news: between supplements and wide availability in food, choline is a highly accessible nutrient. So, work with your doctor to find the sources of choline that work for you.
