Like almost every strange but harmless episode during pregnancy – from tingling hands to a snuffly nose – changes in your sense of taste and your eatings habits can be put down to your hormones.

Why do tastes change in pregnancy?

Hormones The balance of hormones changes during pregnancy, because your body suddenly has to prepare for a new era – channeling nutrition to new parts of the body, loosening up your body’s physiological structure to enable your bump to grow and your lower half to prepare for birth, and so on. And one of the side effects of these hormonal changes is that it can affect your sense of taste.
For some, this might mean they go off certain foods or drinks that they enjoyed before.

Neccessary changes to your diet As well as the hormonal changes, being pregnant usually means enforced changes in our diet. Obvious factors like cutting out alcohol, certain fish, raw meats and fish, and unpasteurised cheeses, might mean that your daily or weekly intake has changed quite a bit since you realised you were having a baby. This shift can cause new habits to form – rediscovering a food you used to love or one you haven’t tried before, as you adapt your diet.

Needing to re-fuel You need to eat well during pregnancy and again this can cause a change in what you eat. If you were the kind of person who used to skip breakfast or have a light lunch, will you find now that you simple cannot get away with it. Instead, you will need to have small snacks through the day as well as your regular meals. You therefore might surprise yourself in how often you are grazing on nuts, fruit etc.