Like other pregnant women, you might be addicted to wine, but you probably have a doubt about its effect on the health of you and your baby. Right? You might think about Can Pregnant Women Drink Wine? and let us know about it.
Your doubt is completely appropriate. The wine is dangerous as well as beneficial at the same time. If you want to know the answer, then you have to give 5 minutes to this blog.
In the coming sections, you’ll learn and everything about wine during pregnancy.
What is wine?
Have you ever heard about fermentation? If yes, then this topic is complete of interest to.
Definition
Wine – a fermented drink or juice of grapes. It is produced mostly from the species of V. vinifera that is almost solely used (often mistakenly referred to as European grape). Also available are drinking from V. labrusca, American native grapes, and other grape species. In the fermentation, the name of the fruit includes other fruits for the production of a kind of wine, as in peach and blackberry.
History
V. vinifera – the most commonly used species for wine was first cultivated 4000 BC years ago in the area of the Middle East. Egyptians are found from 2500 BC, dealing with the utilization of grapes for winemaking. The early origins and importance of the winemaking industry in the Middle East are present in numerous biblical references. Christians in history had a great role in maintaining or progress the popularity of wine. At the Romaine empire, the wine industry faced a fall, but Christians raised this industry.
Processing
Fresh and fully ripened are the best source for the processing of wine. However, in cool climates like North Europe and the eastern USA, a lack of heat may require the grapes to harvest before being fully mature. Harvesting, crushing and pressing, fermentation, clarification, and aging and bottling are the five basic stages or steps in the production of wine. Undoubtedly, there are numerous deviations and variations along the way. In fact, the variations and minor deviations make life interesting at any point in the process.
It is important to know that early harvesting yields low-alcohol wine and while on the other hand, late harvesting yields high alcohol wines with low-acid content.
Wine and Pregnancy
Now, you are clear about how your diet impacts your baby. It is obvious, whatever you are eating or drinking will directly influence your baby. Baby gets all nutrition from mother. If the mother eats healthy fruits and vegetables and has a healthy diet, it will produce a healthy baby. Sometimes diet during pregnancy can develop negative and serious outcomes like abnormal physical or mental health due to some deficiency.
If we talk about wine, it is commonly understood that excess alcohol intake from wine is harmful to your fetus; on the other hand, a potential “safe level” of moderated drinking while pregnant can be somewhat uncertain.
Medical experts advise pregnant women to avoid wine during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. It can affect the child’s health, and the child will have health problems during birth.
But sometimes, wine is good for your pregnancy, and it has benefits.
Mechanism
Whenever a pregnant woman drinks any wine, the alcohol passes through her umbilical cord and reaches the fetus. There is the effect on the heart, eyes, ears, legs, brain, arms, teeth, outside genitalia, and the fetus’s palate. If we talk about the intensity of danger, then the brain comes first. If the mother keeps drinking wine during her pregnancy, cumulative effects will result from this continuous exposure to alcohol.
Binge drinking
This type of drinking can be as the intake of four or more drinks or glasses of wine at a time for women. If you are pregnant and are drinking continuously, the risk of serious behavioral and health problems is greater for your unborn child. Heavy drinking can be elaborate as five or more binge drinks in a single month. High alcohol consumption is clearly a serious risk for you and especially for your unborn child, but even one binge-drinking episode can put your life in jeopardy. Drinking reduces normal defenses and makes it easier for a person to produce sexual drive without taking precautions. There is no problem with drinking when you are sure that you are not pregnant.
How much wine can a pregnant woman drink?
Is it safe to consume alcohol while pregnant? It’s fine to have a glass of wine while pregnant, but not every day. Don’t be concerned if you drank a few drinks before finding you were pregnant. According to doctors, drinking a few glasses of wine during the third week of pregnancy has little risk of harming the fetus. What level of alcohol is safe? It is not so much about the type of wine or the amount that pregnant women can consume as it is about the percentage of alcohol content in wines.
A Moscato Asti, for example, has an alcohol content of between 5% and 6.5 %, which is slightly higher than the percentage of alcohol in a regular beer. However, Madeira and Sherry’s wines have an alcohol content of around 20%. The lower the alcohol content of your wine, the safer you will be if it does not happen frequently.
The Dark side of wine consumption
Wine contains alcohol that is very dangerous for you and your baby; let’s have a look at how much it is detrimental to the human body while pregnancy:
The danger for unborn babies:
As mentioned earlier, your consumption of any food directly affects your little angel; if you consume alcohol, it will negatively affect your unborn baby. Following are the harmful outcomes of wine consumption:
- Underweight birth: Child may have low weight than normal, which can risk the health.
- Premature Birth: Early birth, usually before 37 weeks that is normal.
- Miscarriage: death of a fetus before the 20th week of pregnancy
- Defects by birth: hearing issues or heart defects
- Stillbirth: death of a fetus after 20 weeks of pregnancy
It may also cause several distinctive symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome disorder or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Physical characteristics include:
Physical characteristics include:
- Small Head
- Be shorter than other folks
- Underweight
- Flat nose and the upper lip
Wine directly affects the brain functions of an unborn baby. Poor memory, difficulty in attention, problems with mathematical skills, learning impairments, language delays, voice problems, poor IQ, and poor judgment can be cognitive issues. Hyperactivity and behavioral problems are also included in these issues. They may have CDC-related problems with the heart, skeleton, kidney, vision, or hearing. Besides this, many other issues also emerge. In later life, this can affect your child’s success due to his poor activity in educational institutes.
Central Nervous System of Fetus
According to research, alcohol exposure begins at the womb in the primary weeks of pregnancy. This lasts through the twelfth and third weeks. Alcohol is the rival of the heart and central nervous system of the fetus during the third week of pregnancy. The fetus’s main organs like eyes, limbs, and heart can be affected negatively when you drink wine without any interruption. The palate of the fetus and its outer genitalia (genitalia visible to the eye) will also be negatively affected if you don’t quit it.
Frequent alcohol exposure will negatively affect the brain from the 12th week until the infant’s birth, resulting in the cognitive, learning, and behavioral effects of alcohol exposure before birth.
When you’re finished planning to start a family, you should quit drinking and avoid alcohol for the duration of your pregnancy. If you are irritated from alcohol addiction, it is preferable to seek out programs to help you rehabilitate so that your kid can be born healthily.
A pregnant lady or anyone who has an addiction to alcohol should not try to quit independently. Medical detox plays an essential role in managing possibly life-threatening symptoms. Pregnant women, in particular, must take extra measures during addiction treatment to guarantee the safety of both the mother and the child.
Developmental Disorders
Medical experts distinguish two syndromes that babies develop as a result of prenatal alcohol exposure. These conditions are specified, fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. These are some examples of syndromes:
- Partial fetal alcohol syndrome (pFAS)
- Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS)
- Alcohol-related neurodevelopment disorder (ARND)
- A neurobehavioral disorder linked with prenatal alcohol exposure (ND-PAE)
All of the symptoms associated with full-blown FAS are absent in children with FAS. According to the study, children with ARND have central nervous system abnormalities, including behavioral and cognitive difficulties. No stunted growth or facial deformities may occur.
Children with ND-PAE show symptoms of prenatal alcohol exposure as well as difficulties with the central nervous system. They lack self-control, have cognitive difficulties, and find it difficult to adapt to new conditions.
Alternate; Non-alcoholic wines
The biggest risk of drinking wine is the amount of alcohol it contains. If you drink wine with high alcohol content, your baby’s health will undoubtedly be in jeopardy. You can consume non-alcoholic wines in this case. They have the same great flavor and texture as traditional wine, with the added benefit of not containing alcohol. They’ve been de-alcoholized to 0.0 percent alcohol, making them completely risk-free for people of all ages to enjoy. While there are wines available that have been de-alcoholized to 0.5 percent alcohol, we have purposely excluded them from our suggestions.
During the winemaking process, non-alcoholic wines undergo production in the same way as alcoholic wines. However, at the very end of the process, the wine is de-alcoholized. Non-alcoholic wines contain the same flavor and complexity as traditional wines but without the alcohol’s detrimental consequences.
Summary
In short, if you are pregnant, you should not consume wine. This can lead to negative and serious outcomes; the health of your baby and yours will be in danger. So, if you want healthy delivery and a healthy baby, you have to cut off wine for 9 months.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Here are some FAQs to clear your confusion about wine consumption during pregnancy.
1. I just found out I’m expecting a child. I no longer drink, but I did during the first several weeks of my pregnancy before realizing I expected it. What am I supposed to do now?
The most crucial thing is that following discovery of your pregnancy, you have entirely stopped drinking. It’s never too late to give up alcohol. Because brain development occurs during pregnancy, the sooner you stop drinking, the better for both you and your kid.
If you consumed any amount of alcohol while pregnant, speak with your child’s health care physician right away and express your worries. Make sure you get prenatal care regularly.
2. During my last pregnancy, I drank wine and had a healthy baby. Why should I abstain from drinking during my pregnancy?
Each pregnancy is unique. You can have one child who is born healthy and another who is born with health issues. Alcohol consumption may have a greater impact on one baby than on another.
3. Can a father’s drinking harm his child?
The effects of alcohol on male sperm are now being researched. Whatever the consequences, these are not fetal alcohol spectrum diseases (FASDs). FASDs are caused by the mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
The father’s role, on the other hand, is critical. He can assist the woman in abstaining from using alcohol while pregnant. By avoiding social events that involve drinking, he can encourage her to abstain from alcohol. He can also assist her by abstaining from drinking.
4. Is it safe to drink alcohol when trying to conceive?
You may be pregnant and aren’t aware of it. For the first 4 to 6 weeks after conception, you will most likely be unaware that you are pregnant. This implies you could be drinking and inadvertently exposing your infant to alcohol. Miscarriage and stillbirth can occur if alcohol is consumed during pregnancy. When you begin trying to conceive, the best advice is to quit consuming alcohol.
