I dunno.
I never got it at all.
It was quite an easy pregnancy.
I’ dheard crackers helped. Is that because they are bland?
Welcome to blah blah blah … include the link:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmorningsickness.html
I’m a guy (no pregnancy), but on those odd occasions that I feel sick to my stomach, nibbling on soda crackers helps. I’ve always assumed that it is a good absorber / nutralizer of stomach acid and is therefore effective in low doses, which in turn prevents significant additional acid production. But that’s speculation on my part.
I don’t know if the odor thing is a cause or an effect. People who are sick to their stomachs for whatever reason are more sensative to odors.
What really helps MY stomach is dry oatmeal.
I had always heard that morning sickness was a sign of a healthy pregnancy.
I get it baaaad. With me, it’s not “morning sickness”, it’s “24/7 sickness.” I am pukey all the time, regardless of what I do or do not eat. But I never throw up. I have often thought if I could just throw up, then feel better and get on with my day, that would be great, but it never happens.
On the plus side, I have never felt bad past the three month mark, so at 12 weeks Cassie should be at the bitter end. After those 12 awful weeks, I feel great, better than I do when I’m not pregnant!
Baby #2 (oh God, another boy!) is due in March, so I’m on easy street now.
My wife’s doctor told her another theory about morning sickness being evolutionarily advantageous: it’s the body’s way of telling the woman she’s pregnant, and to lie down a while and take it easy.
I’ve had two bouts of hyperemesis, one of which literally lasted until I was in labor. The crackers never did s*** for me. The theory, as it was explained to me, was that the crackers are bland and generally slightly salty, so the stomach is more likely to accept them. And they put something in your stomach, which is important because many women find that their nausea is worse when their stomachs are empty.
As for me, all that happened is that I learned that throwing up crackers is no fun 
Sometimes it’s the prenatal vitamins that create or exacerbate nausea. Many women do better if they change vitamins or take them at a different time of the day.
I wasn’t sick at all with #1 or #2, but I’m sick all the time with #3. It’s persisting well beyond the first trimester, and although I never actually vomit, I am still sick virtually all the time. It’s nasty, but at least I didn’t have to deal with this the first two times.
Oh, and the crackers? They make it worse, at least in my case.
Steven Pinker http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/ linguist/cognitive scientist/all-around-really-bright-guy made a pretty good case for the toxin-avoidance theory in his book “How the Mind Works”.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the book with me, but as I recall, he states that many kinds of pungent and spicy foods, not just vegetables, can have toxins that can be harmful to the fetus, and it turns out that these indeed tend to be the foods that can exacerbate the nausea. I think that the increased sensitivity to smells, rather than being presented as an opposing theory, is in fact folded into this theory as another trick the human body has developed, like the nausea, to help prevent pregnant women from eating toxic or spoiled foods.
This is not to say that vegetables are entirely bad for pregnant women. Remember - evolution is not intelligent. It can’t weigh the outcomes, and decide whether certain changes are worth the risk. It just happens. If morning sickness is an evolved defense mechanism, it would have happened because babies whose mothers lacked the defense died (or otherwise failed to pass on their genes) significantly more often than the babies whose mothers had the defense. That doesn’t contradict the idea that eating vegetables may indeed lead to bigger, healthier babies. Apparently, though, the advantage afforded by being bigger was negated (on the average) by the disadvantage of being exposed to more toxins.
Or morning sickness could have evolved into a bit of an overreaction. Our bodies take lots of self-protective measures that aren’t entirely effective or fool-proof, or sometimes go overboard, like fevers, histamine reactions, and snot http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a971017.html to name a few.
I’ll post excerpts and references from Pinker’s book later, if I remember. He also mentions a few old, now-debunked theories, some of which still persist in some form. For example, I think it was Freud who gets the credit for the suggestion that women with morning sickness subconsciously resent their pregnancy and are trying to abort it orally. I can’t see anyone actually saying this to a woman now, but I do know a lot of people still think that morning sickness is a sign of something wrong with the woman, either physically or mentally.
And by the way, I agree - “morning sickness” is a major misnomer. It can be any time of day, or even all day. At least it was for me. Yee haw.
I heard an even more elegant/bizarre/stupid (ring your favorite) theory about morning sickness’s evolutionary origins. The idea is that the sickness makes the woman unpleasant to live with, and therefore serves as a test of her mate. If he can stick it out, she can be relatively confident that he will provide for her and the child. If he splits, she can take alternative measures to spare herself the trouble of going through with the pregnancy.
There was an article some years back in Scientific American regarding theories about the evolutionary origins of diseases and reactions, and one of the things mentioned was morning sickness.
http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198nesse.html has the full article (it’s an interesting read, especially the stuff about the appendix).
–Toby Everett
I’d heard also that if you are carrying low, it’ll be a boy. It worked for me and some of my friends.
Probably not, though.
Personally, I don’t think you can really call the “test of a good mate” theory an evolutionary development. If it happened before the woman got pregnant, it might make begin to make some sense, because the bad mates don’t get to pass on their genes. But if she’s already pregnant, it’s a little late for that.
And I can’t help but take a little umbrage at the idea that a woman with morning sickness is so unpleasant to be around as to jeapordize an otherwise lifelong or at least long term mating.
Besides, I notice that being a deadbeat rarely disqualifies someone from being desirable as a mate. If everyone, men and women, took such care in choosing a mate, we’d have a much lower divorce rate, to be sure.
Also, I read the Scientific American article, and it basically reiterates what Profet, Pinker, and others have said on the subject, but they make one statement that befuddles me:
*If Profet is correct, further research should discover that pregnant females of many species show changes in food preferences. *
Why? Is it the case that the same toxins are equally harmful to fetuses of many species? Many other animals eat things that humans cannot, and vice versa. And even if it is the case, that still doesn’t mean that other species will have developed the same defense. That’s what makes them different species. If so many species have developed so many different ways to do things like see, eat, move, and keep warm, why should they all develop the same defense against a relatively little thing like protecting their fetuses from potentially harmful (not deadly, harmful) toxins?
They also go on to say:
Her theory also predicts an increase in birth defects among offspring of women who have little or no morning sickness and thus eat a wider variety of foods during pregnancy.
Again, this is more likely, but not necessarily so. Morning sickness could be an evolved response to a threat that is no longer so dangerous. Perhaps those toxins were much higher in vegetables and certain spicy and pungent foods long ago, but modern farming and cooking have made them relatively benign. The response still persists, even though it isn’t really accomplishing anything anymore, like goosebumps http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mgoosebumps.html
You know?
VELVEETA? You must be joking! That “stuff” isn’t even really cheese. ust the thought of eating that junk makes me want to puke.
I’ve read a simplified version of what Bonnie Jean is stating. It makes the most sense to me that morning sickness is the pregnant body’s way of purging toxins in the system.
I had raging-bad morning sickness, but I had a regular diet that was pretty much free of dairy and breads. I was also used to eating meat on a less than semi-regular basis.
The sickness passed by the end of the fourth month. I don’t know if that was because my body acclimated to the pregnancy or if it was because I added those items to my diet.
chow