New recommendation issued on weight gain and pregnancy: What to know

Topic: New recommendation issued on weight gain and pregnancy: What to know

A new government recommendation on healthy weight gain during pregnancy calls for more counseling from health care providers, and emphasizes working routinely on this with all women throughout their pregnancy.

The recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), an independent and volunteer panel of national experts, goes further than past recommendations in calling on clinicians to offer pregnant women “effective counseling programs to help them maintain a healthy amount of weight and prevent excess weight gain.”

The recommendation, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is a grade B recommendation, meaning the task force has high quality evidence to back up the recommendation.

The grade may also make the counseling programs more accessible to more pregnant women as most private insurance plans are typically required to cover preventive services that get an A or B grade from USPSTF.

“What’s new about these recommendations is they are actually putting the onus of responsibility on the health care professional to counsel women who are pregnant or, ideally, about to be pregnant about the risks associated with excessive weight gain,” said Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News chief medical correspondent and a board-certified OBGYN and nutritionist.

“Unfortunately most health care providers don’t have the training to be able to really help counsel women,” she said. “So it’s really kind of a call to action for all of us to learn as much as we can about nutrition and dietary counseling so that we can help these women during this really important time in their lives.”

Topic Discussed: New recommendation issued on weight gain and pregnancy: What to know

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