Eating Well When You're Pregnant

Moira Harris is a graduate student in animal behavior at the University
of Saskatchewan.

Pregnant women in Canada often lack good Canadian sources of information
about their health, nutrition, and lifestyle. Dietitian Ellen Lakusiak
has tried to rectify this omission in Eating Well When You’re
Pregnant, a woman-focused (rather than baby-focused) guide to perinatal
nutrition. This comprehensive book explains why good perinatal nutrition
is important, discusses special issues that arise during pregnancy and
breast-feeding, answers questions about women’s pregnancy and
breast-feeding, and provides healthful sample menus based on Canada’s
Food Guide.

Unfortunately, the author’s encyclopedic approach leads her to stray
from the topic of women’s nutrition. The additional information she
includes—on, for example, the technicalities of breast-feeding—is
readily available in other texts. Another example of excess is found in
the inclusion of 28 sample menus (a handful would have sufficed)
accompanied by nutritional analyses. Overkill isn’t the only problem
here. The sample menus assume a norm of eating that is blandly North
American, with little concession to other cultures. A sample kosher,
Halal, Hindu, or Ukrainian menu, for instance, would have been welcome.
Finally, although the author does discuss the dietary needs of women who
are vegetarian or vegan, the sample menus are heavily biased toward
animal products.

Lakusiak has done a competent, if unexciting, job of explaining
nutrition during pregnancy and breast-feeding. Her book achieves its
stated aim of practicality, but it could have been more accessible had
she practised moderation: less would have been more.