HAVING a baby is energetically much more expensive than commonly thought, according to new research.

Over the course of a pregnancy, creating and carrying a little one takes 49,753 dietary calories — the equivalent of 199 Snickers candy bars each containing 250 calories, said Dustin Marshall, a coauthor of the study published earlier this month in the journal Science.

For the meta-analysis, Marshall, a professor of evolutionary biology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a team of researchers used data from thousands of existing scientific articles to look at the energy cost of several species.

“While most folks probably intuit, or have actually experienced the high energy demands that come from gestating a baby, our work assigns explicit values to these costs across a wide range of species — from insects to lizards to humans,” said lead study author Samuel Ginther, a postdoctoral researcher of biological sciences at Monash University.

“Most of the energy that mammals put into reproduction is ‘boiled off’ as metabolic heat, only 10% ends up in the actual baby,” Marshall said. “When both lactation and metabolic loads are accounted for, the baby itself represents less than 1/20th of the total reproductive investment.”

The extra calorie needs were not equal across the term of the pregnancy — you need less early on and much more as time goes on, Marshall said.

A person would need about 182.48 extra calories daily over the approximately 272.65 days of their pregnancy, the researchers found.

The current recommendations break down differently by trimester of the pregnancy, said dietitian Natalie Mokari. In the beginning, you may not need many more daily calories, she said. Once you get to the second trimester, you need about 350 extra calories a day, while you need 450 more calories daily in the third trimester, said Mokari. If you breastfeed after the baby is born, you will need to add 450 to 500 more calories to your prepregnancy diet, she added.

You can think of it as an additional substantial snack or mini meal in your day around the second trimester, Mokari said. And by the third trimester and breastfeeding, the additional calories amount to a meal.

She recommends trying to eat every three to four hours or add smaller snacks every two hours throughout the day if that works better for your pregnancy symptoms, she said.

Mokari stressed the importance of carbs for energy, protein and healthy fat — “those high-quality fats that are going to promote good brain health for the baby.”

(SD-Agencies)