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Morning sickness can cause misery for some women while they are pregnant for an evolutionary adaptation designed to make sure that pregnant women don’t digest too much unhealthy food or other substances, and until now, hormones have largely been blamed for causing it. And ginger has long been recognized as a recommended treatment for morning sickness: a recent study suggested it was the only effective treatment.
However new research suggests that the nausea and vomiting a woman can experience actually has a protective function. Nausea and sickness during pregnancy are the body’s way of protecting mother and baby against poisons and bugs in food, research which brought together data from 21 countries suggests.

The University of Liverpool researchers analysed data from 56 previous studies in 21 countries and found evidence that nausea and vomiting during pregnancy is associated with high consumption of alcohol, sugar, oils and meat, BBC News reported. Researchers Dr. Gillian Pepper and Dr. Craig Roberts linked these figures to the typical diet in each country and suggest there is a link between nausea and diet. They found that countries with a high intake of sugars, sweeteners, stimulants such as caffeine, vegetables, meats, milk and eggs had more sick pregnant women and those with high intake of cereals and pulses had lower levels.

They point to the fact that in the days before refrigeration, eating meat, for example, would have raised the risk of the woman being struck down by food poisoning.
It may therefore be that the body is pre-programmed to avoid it during early pregnancy. Many doctors have viewed the nausea and vomiting during the first three months of pregnancy as a response to hormonal changes. But the study research has suggested that morning sickness might have positive consequences – such as a reduced risk of miscarriage.

The study theorizes that the pregnant human body might have developed an aversion to certain unhealthy foods and that this carried over to the present day and the body might reject meat because it is more likely to cause disease. “While there may be no particular harm in eating, say, meat, now that we have refrigeration and best before dates, our bodies may be pre-programmed by evolution to avoid these particular foodstuffs in the first trimester,” Dr Roberts said.
“It may be that the nausea women feel towards certain foodstuffs could be helpful, and that although it is inconvenient and miserable, their nausea could be nature’s way of avoiding problems in pregnancy for both mother and fetus,” they write details of this research are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B; Biological Sciences.

The findings backed a theory put forward by two Cornell University evolutionary biologists, said Dr Roberts. Six years ago, Dr Samuel Flaxman and Prof Paul Sherman Quarterly Review of Biology suggested that morning sickness was beneficial to both mother and foetus, after analysing hundreds of studies covering tens of thousands of pregnancies.
According to them, women with morning sickness are not only keeping themselves healthy but are shielding the foetus from harsh vegetable phytochemicals by vomiting and by learning to avoid certain foods altogether until the baby develops beyond the most susceptible stage as they are significantly less likely to miscarry than women who do not.