How to Be a Vegetarian Mom: Helpful Tips for Pregnancy and Breastfeeding

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Just because you're a vegan or vegetarian doesn't mean you need to alter your diet to have a healthy pregnancy or successfully breastfeed. Find out what you need to do to ensure optimal health for you and your baby.

Pregnancy and breastfeeding place unique nutritional demands on women. Pregnant women require an extra 300 calories per day, and a nursing mother needs about 500 extra calories per day. If you're already panicking at the thought of all this influx of calories, don't worry: Producing milk burns about 600 calories per day, so you will still shed that pregnancy weight!

Everyone benefits from a healthy diet, and growing and feeding a baby are extra incentives to eat well. Most women's diets will require improvements during pregnancy, but for the vegetarian mother, these improvements don't have to include animal products.

By definition, a vegetarian diet is free from all meats including fish, fowl, red meats, and other seafood. A stricter version of vegetarian eating is known as a vegan diet. Vegans avoid all animal products such as dairy, honey, eggs, and animal-derived additives.

Getting Enough Protein

The most persistent question a veggie mom will hear is this: Where do you get your protein? The World Health Organization recommends that protein account for 6 percent of the daily calories while pregnant and 7 percent during breastfeeding, which is easily supplied by plant sources. Legumes, meat analogue products (veggie meats), tofu, tempeh, beans, nuts, and whole grain products all provide complete proteins. If a vegetarian mother incorporates eggs and some dairy products into her diet, meeting protein demands becomes even easier.