The weight that women gain during pregnancy is one of the most relevant issues for some professionals who, month by month, interrogate them through the scale to congratulate them if they have gained little weight and abroncarlas if they have gained more.
The fact is that for some time now the limits are becoming more flexible because it is illogical for a woman to diet while pregnant, if the body asks for more food, and a study conducted with pregnant twins questions these limits by seeing that women who gain more weight have bigger babies.
This, for a woman who expects two babies, is beneficial, since twins and twins usually come to the world with low weight, being sometimes necessary more control to see that everything evolves correctly.
The study was done with 170 women from a private office in New York who gave birth to twins at term. It was also observed in the study that women who gained more weight than is usually recommended did not suffer more gestational diabetes, hypertension or preeclampsia than those who gained less weight.
The more weight, the more likely to weigh more than 2,500 grams
In 2009 the IOM (Institute of Medicine of the United States) established that a woman with normal weight before pregnancy who expected twins could gain between 16.7 and 24.5 kg. One who was overweight could increase from 14 to 22.6 kg and one that was obese between 11 and 19 kg.
Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, authors of the study, wanted to see what the applicability of these recommendations was and what the effects of skipping them and they took a sample of 170 women who had twins or twins between 2005 and 2010.
40% of the women who had gained less weight than recommended had babies over 2,500, compared with 60.5% of those who had gained the recommended weight and 80% of those who had taken an "excessive weight".
Nathan Fox, lead author of the study commented on the following:
Not only did we find that it was not so bad to gain a little more weight, but it even seemed good ... The patients who gained the most weight had bigger babies and had a lower rate of low birth weight.
Conclusions to the study
The recommendations of the IOM will be based on other scientific studies that support them, so a single study conducted with only 170 women should not (nor can) prove that these recommendations are wrong.
Now, seeing that those women who gained more weight had children with more weight without suffering (more) diseases, it could be logical downplay some importance to the fact that a woman with normal weight gains more weight than recommended starting and, evidently, to continue investigating in this regard to clarify concepts.
As I say, it is not normal that there are women who deprive themselves of eating and go hungry during a pregnancy to enter into some tables that could be wrong or that would be nuanced and to avoid receiving reprimands for having taken extra weight.
