6 Recipes to Satisfy Your Pregnancy Cravings

Are you pregnant and craving the bracing saltiness of a pickle or the crumby sweetness of a glazed donut? That’s perfectly normal, says E.J. Aspuru, M.D., an ob-gyn at Northside/Northpoint OB-GYN in Sandy Springs, Georgia. He attributes many pregnancy food cravings to hormone-altered taste buds.

“People might need extra salt or sugar to experience the same flavor intensity as they did before,” Aspuru says. Which is why you may find yourself making extra trips to get frozen yogurt or seeking out super salty foods like anchovies, which Tamar Samuels, a registered dietitian in New York City and co-founder of Culina Health, consumed regularly during her pregnancy.

Balancing Pregnancy Cravings with Nutrition

Typically, cravings are a natural part of pregnancy, but sometimes they signal that your eating habits could use improvement. For example, if you constantly crave sweets, artificially sweetened food and drinks might be to blame. “Sometimes, people use all these sugar substitutes to avoid gestational diabetes, but they aren’t necessarily healthy and can make you crave foods with sugar in them,” Aspuru says. There’s also no data showing that avoiding sugar will keep you from getting gestational diabetes.