have you changed your diet?

[caryn]

Yep, it's completely different! "Albumin" is just a word for "water-soluble protein" - these are usually shaped sort of spherically, which is why they disperse in water and distribute evenly through it.

Egg white has a lot of ovalbumin and some other water-soluble proteins in it. Blood has "human serum albumin", which is an entirely different water-soluble protein. The molecular structures of the two water-soluble proteins are not very similar - ovalbumin has 385 amino acids and human serum albumin has 585, so different shapes and masses, both roughly spherical. (They might say "globular".)

The reason albumins generally would help to transport things in solution would just be that they'd tend to form colloid solutions - drop some into a glass of water, and it will disperse throughout the water and thicken it up a bit, like egg white or blood, and push on the other stuff dissolved in the solution.

[caryn]

(And before a chemist fusses at me - I shouldn't call them "colloid solutions" because the point of a colloid is that it's not a solution. A "solution" is one substance dissolved in a solvent, and a "colloid" is just evenly mixed, not dissolved. They are technical terms which I just blithely misused because I was running out of straightforward words! But stuff can be dissolved in the solution and then it can form a colloid, and that's what happens here - oxygen etc. is dissolved in the bloodstream, which is colloid because it has human serum albumin mixed throughout it.)

[caryn]

Oh! And no, it doesn't really affect the amount of work your liver and endocrine system do to make human serum albumin to eat ovalbumin, because what happens when you eat food is that it gets broken into individual amino acids in your stomach. Then those individual amino acids (385 of them if you eat ovalbumin) move into your bloodstream, and then the liver handles glucose/glycogen manufacture (for energy), protein synthesis, and lipid synthesis, using those constituent amino acids and hormones and such.

IIRC it's all about the pressure differential - if the liver "notices" that the blood is at lower pressure than the target it makes more human serum albumin. A lot of bodily functions work like that - stuff diffuses across membranes or gets produced in response to a difference in pressures on the two sides of the membrane, wherever the membrane is. In this case, it would be the liver, but the placenta works like this too - oxygen diffuses into the fetal side of the placenta from the maternal side because there's more on our side, and it pushes across just because the pressures want to be equal...

[danielsmom]

Ah-ha. Thank you very much! I'm still eating eggs because omelets are yummy. And hey, might be good DHA food too.

I wish there was a magic pill or food for this awful disease, but in a way, I'm glad it's not in our hands. Truth be told, I probably ate more healthy with my son's pregnancy than I have with this one, but things are already more successful this time around (no growth restriction or other ultrasound "look at" stuff). I'm now 25 weeks, the gestation that I started getting sick last time. I thought I'd be more nervous about that. It's just that this pregnancy is so different.

[mychaelelaine]

thanks everyone. all of your responses put things into perspective. caryn, you summed it up for me. i don't use salt @ all on my food. i used mrs. dash. i pretty much have always kept my salt intake below 1200 mgs. i didn't think drastically reducing my salt intake to lets say no more than 600 mg would prevent preeclampsia but wanted to get you guys opinion. i see the mfm next wednesday. i will get her input as well. thanks everyone!