At my first appointment, the nurse handed me a pregnancy goody bag. It was so exciting! Along with photocopied information and glossy advertisements were four different kinds of prescription prenatal vitamins. In addition to folic acid, which I already knew was important, she informed me that the vitamins all had DHA - something related to fish oil that some studies showed might make my baby smarter but might make me gassy.
I paused, then asked how certain they were that this DHA stuff worked. She backpedaled and assured us it's been shown to make babies smarter.
Okay, really people. When my child achieves a high score on the ACT or SAT, are my husband and I gonna chest bump and exclaim "I'm so glad we got this child extra DHA in the womb! It totally paid off!"? No, if anything we'll high five each other and credit the genes we gave him or her, along with our persistent nagging to finish his or her homework. People were going to Princeton long before DHA came along.
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My husband and I are just skeptical enough to be dubious of these types of claims, and just cautious enough to do whatever the medical establishment tells us is best for our child. In the end, of course I'm going to take the prenatal vitamins (luckily mine didn't make me gassy!). If they told me that standing on my head for five minutes a day would help the baby, I'd probably be suspicious but do that anyway, too!
The next question, though, is how important is it to get the brand name vitamins? My husband always wants to go with brand names for anything you're putting in or on your body (perhaps a remnant from his father, who's always worked for big pharmaceuticals?). However, they charge an arm and a leg and our insurance is trying to give us a bit of a runaround. They'll pay for it eventually, but it's such a hassle that I'm ready to go buy the off-the-shelf prenatals from Wal-Mart after this month's supply runs out.
So out of curiosity, what have you done about prenatal vitamins? Prescription or off-the-shelf? Brand name or generic? With or without DHA? Anything else I should know about this stuff? We aren't the only skeptics, are we?