Your First Pregnancy
Planning for a pregnancy involves many details. Ensuring you have optimum iron levels is one of them. During the childbearing years, adequate iron is needed for optimum fertility, proper placenta development at the time of conception, prevention of low birth weight babies and pre-term labor, and to provide sufficient iron stores for the baby’s first six months of life.Women’s iron requirements double during pregnancy and, without proper diet and effective supplementation, iron stores can drop and continue to decline with each subsequent pregnancy.Women planning a pregnancy should have serum ferritin levels of at least 70 ug/l. Currently only 1/5 of women have this level of iron stores. (Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand 1994) According to the National Institute of Nutrition low iron stores are also associated with decreased fertility as iron is involved with making reproductive hormones including estrogen and progesterone. (Danish Food Directorate)

Fifty percent of pregnant women not taking iron supplements are deficient sometime in their pregnancy. A recent study with pregnant women showed that a low dose iron supplement of 20 mg/day from the 20 week of pregnancy to delivery reduced iron deficiency anemia and iron deficiency at delivery and postpartum without the side effects usually found with high dose iron supplements. (Journal of Nutrition, 2003) High dose iron supplements in pregnancy are very poorly tolerated as constipation is usually worse at this time. There has also been a concern that doses of higher than 60 mg/day in pregnancy may be linked with increased low birth weight, premature births and free radical damage. (Biological Trace Element Research, 2001) Clearly, preventing deficiencies with iron rich foods and low dose iron supplements is a much safer option.

Iron cost of a normal pregnancy
The iron "cost" of pregnancy is high. Iron provides the transport of oxygen between mother and baby. The mother doubles her blood volume during pregnancy and provides the iron stores for her baby for the first six months of life. In the last trimester 3 -4 mg /day of iron is transferred to the baby. Also after birth, the mother needs iron during breast feeding and to recover from the blood loss from childbirth.

Iron contributed to the baby 200 – 370 mg
In placenta and cord 30 –170 mg
In blood loss at delivery 90 – 310 mg
Lactation 0.5–1 mg/day