Anorexia is scary enough but doctors are also concerned about women who try to diet during pregnancy. The phenomenon has been dubbed pregorexia. Fox News has a story about pregorexia. Doctors are very concerned about it because gaining too little weight during pregnancy has been linked to lower birth weights in babies and premature births.
"It's vital women know that pregnancy is no time to be starving yourself," Pat O'Brien, a consultant obstetrician at University College Hospital and the Portland Hospital in London, told the Daily Mail. "During the nine months it is in the womb, the baby is growing faster than it ever will in later life."
Gaining too little weight during pregnancy is associated with poor fetal growth, lower birth weight and the chance of a baby's being born prematurely, according to a study released in May from RTI International-University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Evidence-based Practice Center.
Alvarez said expectant mothers need to consume certain vitamins such as folic acid and vitamin B, as well as calcium to ensure the health of their unborn babies.
"What we expect is that, whenever possible, women should have a physical before they get pregnant — that way they can be evaluated for risk factors such as being overweight or underweight," he said. "Being overweight can lead to complications such as diabetes and being underweight can lead to problems such as low birth weight."
Here's a video from CBS that describes the warning signs of pregorexia. Women need more calories and nutrition during pregnancy not less. Exercise can also be overdone so pregnant women need to be carefull not to overdue it.
Reuters reports that a new study has linked a large number of birth defects to mothers who have type 1 or type 2 diabetes. The research found that diabetic women are three times as likely to have a baby with a birth defect than non-diabetic women.
A variety of different birth defects are associated with mothers who have type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes, or type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease that is linked to obesity, the researchers said.
These included defects of the heart, brain, spine, limbs, kidneys and gastrointestinal tract, penile and ear abnormalities and cleft palate, the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
"This study documents the fact that diabetes is associated with a wider range of defects than we had been aware of in the past," Dr. Adolfo Correa of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
The study was pretty large comprising of 13,030 babies born with birth defects around the United States and 4,895 babies without birth defects. Other articles about the study can be found on WebMD, U.S. News and ABC2News.
A new website called Aha Baby has launched. The site bills itself as a pregnancy search engine.
Pregnancy is an exciting journey filled with hopes, questions and new experiences. When trying to conceive and during pregnancy, expectant parents want information about the changes they are undergoing. Often, they conduct their own searches using the Internet since no single pregnancy site has all the answers they need. These searches become complex and time consuming as they weed through irrelevant data to find the right information for them.
Now, users can turn to ahababy.com to get the absolute best quality information in one trusted resource. Unlike a typical web publisher, it doesn't limit you to their content only. Aha! Baby has found the best sites pulled from all over the web to provide expectant parents everything they need to know based on their situation and those people most like them.
"I'm pregnant with twins and need answers to many different topics like specific medical symptoms, preparing our nursery and buying baby gear," said Nancy Luft, an Ahababy.com user who is 32 weeks pregnant. "I go to AhaBaby.com because it has the best quality information out there pulled from multiple, reliable sources on the web. AhaBaby.com is easy to use so now I have all this knowledge at my fingertips."
AhaBaby.com also lets users personalize their experience by entering their due date.
Stork Tunes is a new compilation CD consisting of soothing music by top artists that celebrates motherhood. It was released in support of the March of Dimes. Proceeds from the sale of the CD will fund March of Dimes efforts to give every baby a healthy start in life.
"Stork Tunes helps us achieve two critical goals of our organization, namely providing useful resources for moms and pregnant women, and raising money for research and other programs to help more babies be born healthy," said Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, president of the March of Dimes. "We are honored and grateful that these high-level artists were willing to donate their music to our cause."
The artists who contributed to Stork Tunes, and their songs, are:
Celine Dion - "A Mother's Prayer"
Dixie Chicks - "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)"
Jessica Andrews - "I Wish for You"
The Boys Choir of Harlem - "Children of the World"
Katrina Carlson - "Mother"
Norah Jones - "Sunrise"
Dean Backholm - "Mother & Child"
Kenny Loggins - "Rainbow Connection"
Billy Joel - "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)"
Sinead O'Connor - "All Babies"
Wynonna Judd - "Always Will"
Raffi - "May There Always be Sunshine"
According to the March of Dimes, studies show that music can ease the pain of labor -- and pregnant women and medical professionals across the country are increasingly embracing this notion. The March of Dimes also says some hospitals even supply CD players in their maternity and birthing centers. A lot of pregnant women like to play classical music as well.
Study Finds Women's Voice More Attractive When Most Fertile
New Scientist is reporting on study that says women's voices are the most attractive when they are the most fertile. They replayed recording of women counting from 1 to 10 to both men and women and found both sexes found the voices most attractive when the women were at a peak fertility cycle.
The results are in line with evidence that the female voice box, or larynx, is under the influence of sex hormones, says Gallup. He says the changes in the female voice during peak fertility support the view that women are "different" at that point in the menstrual cycle - in other words, that they experience oestrus.
The theory of human oestrus remains controversial because its effects are subtle; human females show none of the distinct genital swellings seen in other female mammals "in heat". But there is increasing evidence of more subtle changes. "Other differences include changes in sexual receptivity and odour sensitivity," Gallup says.
Martie Haselton and Greg Bryant at the University of California, Los Angeles, say that vocal pitch plays an important role in judging fertility. "We have found that voices are higher in pitch on high-fertility days of the cycle," says Haselton.
It is an interesting study but it seems unlikely to be of much help at all to couples trying to get pregnant.
Ricki Lake Creates Controversial Documentary on Birthing Industry
Actress and talk show host Ricki Lake is targeting the birthing industry in a new documentary called The Business of Being Born. Lake is concerned that other countries have lower infant mortality rates than the United States. She recently appeared on the Today Show to talk about birthing experience and about her documentary.
It's already stirring controversy as well as criticism from the medical community, which feels maligned by Lake's advocacy of giving birth at home, a course chosen by just 1 percent of American women.
"This movie is not about hospitals versus home," Lake told TODAY's Ann Curry in New York. "I'm raising some really major questions about the medical system and whether it's really servicing mothers and babies as well as it could."
The United States, she said, has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world.
According to "The CIA World Factbook," Singapore led the world with an infant mortality rate of 2.30 per 1,000 live births, followed by Sweden with a rate of 2.76 and Japan at 2.80. The United States' rate of 6.37 ranked just 37th, behind South Korea and Cuba and just ahead of Croatia. The highest mortality rate was in Angola, where the rate is 184.44 deaths for every 1,000 births.
"The fact that we have the second-worst infant mortality rate in the developed world is a statistic that I think people need to know about," she said. "We are the richest country in the world and the technology that we have is amazing today. Women in their 40s and even in their 50s can get pregnant today and carry children and deliver, babies are living at 23 weeks gestation. It's amazing the strides we’ve made. But in that process, we've lost normal birth."
Abby Epstein is the director of the film. You can see more details about it here on the film's website.
Photo: From the The Business of Being Born documentary - certified Nurse-midwife Cara Muhlhahn attends the homebirth of Mayra and David Radzinski.
Reuters is reporting that the leaning stance women make when they are pregnant is something that evolved in human beings. Without evolution women's vertebrae would be damaged in this position.
Pregnant pre-humans appeared to have stood the same way. And it may save women from even more back pain than they already have, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
The bodies of women do two things when they are pregnant -- they adjust their stance to move the center of gravity to accommodate the growing fetus, and the lower vertebrae have evolved a distinct shape to allow this shifting to take place without damaging the spine, Katherine Whitcome of Harvard University and colleagues found.
"It was one of these things like, 'Oh my god, no one's ever thought of this,' and it looks so obvious," Liza Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin, who helped supervise the work, said in a telephone interview.
Whitcome and Shapiro followed 19 women through their pregnancy, using digital cameras and motional analysis equipment to map the changes in stance and movement as the months passed.
"What women do when their pregnancy reaches about half of the expected mass ... they shift backwards," Shapiro said.
Men do not have this capability and so they are less able to carry extra tummy weight such as a beer belly.
A new website called 
Actress and talk show host Ricki Lake is targeting the birthing industry in a new documentary called The Business of Being Born. Lake is concerned that other countries have lower infant mortality rates than the United States. She recently 