Bringing Up Baby: Pregnancy Nutrition And Laroot

During pregnancy, there’s nothing more vital than consuming a well-balanced diet of whole foods high in lean protein, complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, fiber, and essential vitamins and minerals (especially calcium). It’s generally recommended, of course, that half of one’s plate should consist of fruits and vegetables, while saturated fat, added sugars, and sodium should be limited.

Laroot’s weekly menus—composed only of local, organic ingredients—include meals packed with the nutrition that an expectant mother and growing baby need. Our Flamenco Escabeche, for example, centers on Maine-caught salmon that provides omega-3 fatty acids, essential to a baby’s brain development, as well as protein and vitamin D, both crucial for the growth of healthy bones and teeth. And our Three Sisters Stew and Moroccan Tagine, to name just two, contain legumes rich in iron, folate, potassium, and magnesium, micronutrients that are critical during the early stages of pregnancy. (All Laroot meals can be customized according to your unique dietary requirements.)

Certain whole foods, which you’ll find in Laroot’s ancestral dishes, offer particularly optimal nutrition for expectant mothers. Citrus fruits such as oranges, for one, contained in the KC (“Korean Carrot”) Soup, are loaded with vitamin C, partly responsible for a baby’s bone growth and instrumental in mitigating morning sickness. (The vitamin also features in abundance in the daikon broth of Laroot’s At Home in Japan sea-bass soup; the broth can be ordered separately, too.) Green lentils, which appear in our Nowruz Ash, provide fiber, protein, B vitamins, and high amounts of folate, a water-soluble vitamin that helps prevent congenital disabilities of the brain and spine. And walnuts, an accompaniment to the spinach phkali pâté in our Sunset in Tbilisi lunch, brim with folic and fatty acids considered critical for a baby’s neural development, and may reduce the risk of diabetes and hypertension later in their life.