Five thousand years ago – while Europeans were charring a hunk of raw bison over an open flame – the Chinese had already developed a method of quickly cooking small pieces of vegetables and fish with rice or noodles and eating them with chopsticks. In other words, stir-frying. The modern Asian diet hasn't changed very much from those ancient antecedents.

During pregnancy, this may just be the ideal diet to follow. According to Mary Saucier Choate, food and nutrition educator for Co-op Food Stores, Hanover and Lebanon, N.H., the Asian diet is an excellent food pattern to use during pregnancy.

"The [Asian] diet provides important nutrients for fetal health such as folate from greens, citrus and beans, and healthy oils from seeds and nuts and fish," says Choate. "Like many traditional diets, the Asian diet is based on plant foods such as grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds."

In 1995, senior scientists from Harvard School of Public Health, Cornell University and other institutions released an Asian Diet Pyramid, which is based on a generalized summary of the traditional healthy diets of Asian populations. They did this as a healthier alternative to the 1992 U.S. Food Guide Pyramid. What these scientists felt the U.S. Food Guide Pyramid lacked was a distinction between plant and animal foods.

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