Nutrition plays a vital role in perinatal and neonatal health and nutritional counseling can enable women to modify behavior through improved diet and nutrition patterns. Perinatal nutritional counseling services—unlike lower-intensity diet and nutrition advice or education—includes individual assessment and development of a nutrition care plan, follow-up, and reassessment during each trimester and postpartum period, targeted education, and intervention if problems are detected.
In this report, we focus on the higher-intensity perinatal nutritional counseling, and do not include information on lower-intensity diet and/or nutrition advice that may be provided by Obstetricians/Gynecologists or other clinicians as part of a routine patient visit.