3 Pregnancy Smoothie Recipes For Baby Brain Development (Memory Function & Attention Span)

Hey guys, welcome to Pregnancy and Postpartum TV. Today we're making three delicious pregnancy smoothies with unique and surprising ingredients for your baby's brain development. I also have a surprise appearance at the end from my husband. He's going to try the smoothies and see if he can guess what the ingredients are. This first smoothie contains choline. One study showed that 54% of pregnant mothers had a choline deficiency. Choline is vital for your baby's memory development, it's future attention span and neural tube formation. The surprising ingredient in this smoothie is a hard boiled egg. After boiling the egg, I pop it into an ice bath for easy peeling. You will absorb choline better from whole foods rather than a supplement and it's important to include the yolk where most of the choline is. One egg provides 147 mg of choline and pregnant women require 450 mg per day. If you're having trouble getting eggs in, this is a great way to sneak them in. Also Easter is coming up, you can use your leftover Easter eggs. The next smoothie is a vanilla white bean smoothie. This smoothie is packed with fiber, folate, potassium, iron and phytochemicals to fight against oxidative stress and inflammation. The surprising ingredient is white kidney beans. You can either cook dried beans or use them from a can, rinsing them and you won't even notice the flavor. If you aren't a bean lover, then this is the perfect way to get them in. Avocado also contains lutein for your baby's eye and neurological development. Next up we have a sweet potato ginger smoothie. Because it's all being blended, I didn't even peel the sweet potato, I just roughly chopped it, popped it in the steamer for 20 minutes and let it cool. Sweet potato is rich in beta carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A. Vitamin A is essential for the growth and differentiation of cells and helps with your baby's lung development and maturation. This last smoothie probably has the weirdest ingredients, but if you're plant based it can be challenging to get your choline in. Mushrooms are a great way to do this. So I use shiitake mushrooms in this smoothie. You can use them fresh, I'm using them dehydrated here, but it's masked by the delicious chocolate banana flavor. Alright, so I brought my husband Jeff in and he's a pretty picky smoothie person, and so we're going to see if he can tell what the weird ingredient in each smoothie is. So this is the first one. Weird ingredient? Okay. This one is high in choline. It helps with baby's memory development. All it tastes is banana. Banana. But pretty good, right? Mmhmm. Okay, so the secret ingredient in this is egg. Hard boiled egg. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's good. Alright, so this is the second one. Alright. I don't know, this one tastes different. Maybe like a yogurt in this one or something? So that one is white kidney beans in that one. So getting your ligaments and fiber and potassium. Oh, that's pretty good. Alright, number three. Alright. Oh, this one tastes different. It's got cinnamon in it. That one has cinnamon, yeah. I can't tell anything else. Sweet potato. Oh, really? Yep. Okay, that's good. Made of carotene in that one. Oh, that's a good one. Mmhmm. Oh, took another sip. Yeah, that was good. Alright, and the very last one. Chocolate? It does have chocolate. It's lighter than the other ones. So that one is shiitake mushrooms, which is a plant-based source of protein. Wow, that was good. Yeah. That was really good. I will link to all these recipes in the description box below. I also have a pregnancy meal plan that I put together as a registered dietitian. This video was a little bit different, but of course I will keep making pregnancy workouts, pilates, yoga every week. If you like videos like these, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Let me know if you want to see more nutrition, smoothie, and pregnancy recipes.