Comportamento alimentar na gestação e sua relação com o peso da criança ao nascer

Abstract

During pregnancy, with the progressive nutritional demand of the fetus to grow and develop, it is necessary that maternal nutrition be complete and balanced. In this sense, inadequate gestational eating behaviors can cause harm to the mother-child binomial. Thus, the objective of this study is to evaluate different gestational eating behaviors and their association with the baby's birth weight. This is a longitudinal study, conducted with pregnant women assisted in the public and private network of Lavras-MG. Data collection was performed through a face-to-face interview during the gestational period (collected before the isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic) and by telephone, due to the pandemic, in the postpartum period. Sociodemographic, obstetric and anthropometric data were collected. The assessment of eating behaviors was identified through self-administered questionnaires, Three Factor Eating Questionnaire (TFEQ R-21), Intuitive Eating Scale-2 (IES-2) and Mindful Eating Questionnaire (MEQ-28). The baby's weight at birth was obtained through the mother's self-report, with data reported from the Child Handbook and subsequently categorized into tertiles. Data were tabulated using the Epi Info software and statistical analyzes were performed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) program. The Kruskal-Wallis test, followed by the Bonferroni post-test, was performed to compare the median of eating behaviors in the different tertiles of the baby's birth weight. The sample consisted of 127 mother/child pairs, with the mother's age ranging between 18 and 42 years and the baby's weight between 2.5 and 4.5 kg. Of these, 65.1% (n=82) declared themselves to be black/brown and 67.7% (n=86) were married or lived in a consensual union. Almost half of the pregnant women 49.6% (n=60) were classified as overweight according to the pre-gestational Body Mass Index (BMI). In the evaluation of eating behaviors, it was observed that women who had their babies born with weight in the second tertile ate less due to negative emotions and more intuitively during pregnancy, when compared to the other groups. In view of this, the findings indicate that the more intuitive eating behaviors and mindfulness adopted during the gestational period seem to protect against birth weight deviations, being an interesting phase to work on intuitive and emotional eating.