How prenatal vitamins help you get pregnant

Okay guys, I tried to keep it short so that I could give you a quick answer on whether prenatals can help you get pregnant faster… but it turned into this article that covers pretty much all you need to know about prenatals when you're planning to have a baby! This is a MUST read if you're trying to get pregnant as it covers everything from the different ingredients, to when you should start taking them, their benefits, and which brands are best.

And, as always here on Stork Academy… you get my unfiltered, scientific opinion. Because I may be a scientist, but I'm also just a 30-something year old who actively remembers how stressful it was to frantically compare brands and ingredients, trying to decide if that $50 bottle of prenatals would be significantly better than the $3 version I have sitting in my kitchen cabinet.

If you're trying to conceive (TTC) you're probably aware that prenatal vitamins are crucial in protecting the health of your baby. But hey, you're not pregnant yet. So there's no baby to protect yet, right? Well, prenatal vitamins do a lot more than just protect your baby. Prenatal vitamins are crucial for your fertility too!

Is it safe to take a prenatal when you're not pregnant yet?

The very first thing you might ask yourself when you're planning to have a baby is: what can I do to make sure that me and my future bubs are as healthy as possible? After all, prenatals are mostly developed for women who are already pregnant.

Well, the CDC recommends that all women of reproductive age take 400 micrograms of folic acid each day, not just women who are already pregnant! The Mayo Clinic states that "it's generally a good idea for women of reproductive age to regularly take a prenatal vitamin." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends taking a prenatal at least 1 month before becoming pregnant -- but since you can't predict the future, it's a good bet to start when (or right before) you start trying.

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Prenatals vs. multivitamins

Prenatals differ from regular multivitamins in a couple of ways. Most notably they contain folate, which is incredibly important for fetal brain development. Prenatals also have a higher iron content -- crucial during pregnancy, but if you're not pregnant yet, too much iron can cause discomfort (constipation or nausea) in some women. One way to avoid this is by sticking to gummy prenatals, since they typically don't contain iron (always check the label!). If you've been trying for a few months or years and haven't gotten pregnant yet, ask your doctor about prenatals -- it's good to get the all-clear.

Prenatals: boosting your chances of getting pregnant

Besides using ovulation predictor kits and knowing your fertile window, what else can you do to get pregnant faster? That's where prenatals come in. Perhaps the first study to seriously look into fertility and prenatal vitamin use is a large Hungarian study from 1996. Almost 8,000 women participated, and the results are promising: women who took prenatal multivitamins had higher odds of conceiving and did so faster.

Women given a multivitamin with 800 micrograms of folic acid conceived 71.3% of the time within 14 months. A second group given only a placebo-like trace element supplement (copper, manganese, zinc, and vitamin C, no folic acid) conceived 67.9% of the time. The gap may look small, but this study recruited couples broadly -- most without fertility problems -- so for the roughly 1 in 8 couples who do struggle to conceive, that difference could matter quite a bit more.

Prenatals: slicing the risk of anovulation in half

Infertility due to anovulation (not ovulating) is one of the biggest reasons for not getting pregnant -- when you're not ovulating, you can't get pregnant, full stop. So making sure you ovulate is crucial.

In the Harvard Nurses' Health Study, researchers found that women who took a prenatal every day had a 41% lower risk of anovulation. In a separate Danish study, women taking a prenatal had about a 15% higher chance of getting pregnant per cycle -- and women with irregular, long, or short cycles benefited the most.

Prenatals: doubling pregnancy rates in women with PCOS

PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) affects about 1 in 10 women and often goes undiagnosed until a "why am I not pregnant yet" doctor's visit. A UK study looked at women with subfertility due to ovulation issues, most requiring the ovulation-inducing drug Clomid. After 3 months, women who also took a prenatal got pregnant much more often (66.6%) than women who took only folic acid (39.3%) -- a striking difference, and a sign that folic acid alone likely isn't enough.

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Prenatals: improving egg quality

You're born with all the eggs you'll ever have, but not all are of equal quality, and quality declines with age. Research has shown women undergoing infertility treatment tend to have lower levels of key micronutrients and antioxidants -- zinc, selenium, and vitamins B2, B6, C and E among them.

The good news: researchers found a multivitamin can help restore these micronutrient levels in women undergoing IVF, and multivitamin supplementation has been linked to better egg and embryo quality.

Prenatals: decreasing miscarriage rates and other benefits

Unfortunately, about 1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss, many in the earliest weeks. A study from Michigan and Texas found that taking a multivitamin before getting pregnant cut miscarriage risk in half. A separate 2016 review of 40 trials and almost 300,000 women found lower rates of both stillbirth and miscarriage among women taking prenatal multivitamins. Other research links multivitamin use to a lower risk of several birth defects -- low birth weight, neural tube defects, urinary tract defects, heart defects, limb defects, and even a lower risk of autism, mostly attributed to folate.

Picking the best one: folic acid or methylfolate?

Prenatal vitamins contain essential minerals like iron and magnesium and antioxidants like B12, C, D and riboflavin, but perhaps the most important ingredient is folate. Most prenatals use the synthetic form, folic acid; some use methylfolate (L-methylfolate), a more "natural" form. Most research has been done on folic acid, and it's well established as safe and effective. Folic acid requires an extra conversion step in your body to become usable; if you have the MTHFR gene mutation (most common in Hispanic populations, at about 25%), that conversion is less efficient -- not impossible, just less efficient. Methylfolate skips that step, which is its main advantage; folic acid's main advantage is the sheer weight of research behind it, even in people with the mutation. There are several good options either way.

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Picking the best prenatal vitamins: gummies or pills

Gummy vitamins skip iron (it tastes terrible, and most people don't need it until they're actually pregnant), so they're gentler on the stomach. They also tend to skip riboflavin and thiamine, and contain less zinc and no calcium, and you often need to take two to four a day to match a single pill's dose -- gummies also tend to cost more. Pills pack a wider spectrum of minerals and antioxidants into one dose. Before pregnancy, gummies are a perfectly reasonable choice; once you're pregnant, it's worth switching to a prenatal that includes iron. As always, check with your doctor if you're unsure which is right for you.

References

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