Nutrition is a determiner of a person’s health. Most health issues, such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes, are associated with a person’s nutritional practices. A person’s behavior is a determiner of the nutritional practices one employs, whether healthy or high-risk behaviors such as excessive alcohol intake, smoking, among other unhealthy nutritional behaviors. It is, therefore, important to understand a person’s behavior to maintain health. A mother’s eating behavior before and during pregnancy affects the mother’s weight and the unborn baby’s health during development in the womb and after birth. During pregnancy, most mothers gain weight excessively, risking the life of the unborn baby and the mother’s health. Therefore, it is important to understand the interplay between nutritional practices and personal traits such as extraversion, those that are neurotic, and the diligent/careful (conscientious) mothers to help the health caregivers understand the patients better for better guidance to the mothers.
Weight gain among pregnant women affects children before birth, after birth, and later on, when they are adults. According to Stubert et al. (2018), the number of obese women in the child-bearing age is a third of the population. This has exposed mothers and children to various health risks. There are a big number of women who gain weight appropriately and those that gain excessive weight. This can be linked to personality traits. According to Shakeri et al. (2020), pregnant women who are extroverts reported low weight gain during pregnancy. The extroverts are more social and emotional compared to the introverts. Emotional eating is affected by the hormonal changes during pregnancy, which further led to the wrong choice of foods hence low weight during pregnancy. This has an impact on the child’s intellectual developments (Li et al., 2018). Hence, it is essential to advise the extraverts on the importance of a balanced diet during pregnancy for the baby’s health.
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Conscientiousness is a personality trait characterized by carefulness and control over one’s urges. The research showed that the more conscientious pregnant women were not obese. This is as a result of inner control and carefulness in choosing what to consume during pregnancy. Those that had low conscientiousness gained more weight and thus exposed their unborn children to health risks (Shakeri et al., 2020). The neurotic mothers gained less weight compared to the non-neurotic mothers, according to the research. The highly neurotic mothers had a high rate of emotional eating, and according to the research, emotional eating was inversely proportional to weight gain (Shakeri et al., 2020). Personal traits affect the personal choice of foods and vegetables as well as fruits.
The information on the relation betwixt personal traits, nutrition, and weight gains among pregnant women concerns pregnant women and health caregivers. The pregnant mothers should understand their character traits and beware of how it will affect their health choices and nutritional choices on their health and their babies’ health. Understanding the character traits and their role in the health of pregnant mothers will help health caregivers to offer useful guidance to pregnant mothers, thus improving service delivery.
The research concentrated on relations betwixt personality traits and the nutritional choice and its effects on the mother’s weight gain. More research must be done to understand the mother’s personality traits before pregnancy to come up with conclusive recommendations. This will, in turn, improve health education during the critical pregnancy period for healthy mothers and babies.
In retrospect, there lies a relationship between personality traits and nutritional practices during pregnancy. Excessive weight gains or low weight gain endangers the baby’s health and the mother's health. It is, therefore, important to understand this for improved health.
References
Li, C., Zhu, N., Zeng, L., Dang, S., Zhou, J., Pei, L., Watson, V., Chen, T., Wang, D., &Yan., H. (2018). Effect of maternal pre-pregnancy underweight and average gestational weight gain on physical growth and intellectual development of early school-aged children. Scientific reports, 8 (1), 12014. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598018-30514-6
Shakeri, M., Jafarirad, S., Amani. R., Cheraghian, B., & Najafian, M. (2020). A longitudinal study on the relationship between mother’s personality trait and eating behaviors, food intake, maternal weight gains during pregnancy and neonatal birth weight. Nutritional journal, 19 (1), 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-020-00584-2
Stubert, J., Reister, F., Hartmann, S., & Janni, W. (2018). The Risks Associated with Obesity in Pregnancy. Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 115 (16), 276-283. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.2018.0276
