More Education and Counseling Needed to Teach Women about Risks of Obesity During Pregnancy

Share On Social!

More education and counseling is needed to teach overweight women in the U.S. with hopes to become pregnant about the dangers of being overweight during pregnancy, Reuters reports.

In the country, 32.6 percent of Latina women over the age of 18 are obese compared to 24.8 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

A new study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics revealed that 31 percent of overweight women hoping to get pregnant “mistakenly thought their weight was “about right” and 47 percent thought their diet was healthy and saw no reason to adjust what they were eating.”

“Overweight women trying to conceive largely misperceive their weight, which is concerning because they may not try to adopt healthier behaviors,” study author Mahbubur Rahman of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston told Reuters.

The study administered questionnaires to 1,726 women over the age of 16 but not older than 40 in reproductive clinics in southeast Texas.

Researchers also discovered that “More than half of the women planning pregnancy showed low knowledge of obesity risks in their survey answers. And more than three-quarters said they felt confused about what constitutes a healthy diet.”