Um ya… cheese is an urban myth.

Now, it isn’t all cheese, i’m sure cheddar and mozza is fine, as well as cheese slices. But all the other gourmet ones, you better think twice. Is it truly worth the risk to your child to be the one to figure out that yes, it CAN cause miscarriage.

As for raw fish, the problem isn’t that its raw but the fish could have bacteria in it as well that cooking would normally kill. It’s a risk factor.

Stop being a whiner.

It was worth 18 months of giving up certain cheese, and sushi to have 2 living babies – no miscarriages.

If you look at the actual results, what it shows it that intake of more than EIGHT cups of coffee a day at 16 weeks of pregnancy may be correlated with stillbirth (about triple the risk). Table 2 is the relevant table in the paper.

However, the confidence interval included 1.0, meaning that the result was only of bare and borderline statistical signifiance. Smoking, alcohol, and some demographic characteristics were controlled for, but there are some very notable omissions: drug intake and nutrition, including eating disorders and intake of Listeria-risk foods. It is entirely reasonable to postulate that there may be an association between drinking more than eight cups of coffee a day in early pregnancy (seriously, eight cups?!), and disordered eating, intake of amphetamines/cocaine, and possible various other factors that are associated with poorer pregnancy outcomes – but they didn’t even ask. The authors later replied saying that they didn’t consider drug abuse an issue because the incidence of drug abuse is a “minor problem” in Denmark.

That is without including consideration of the possibility that women with non-viable pregnancies don’t get as nauseous and lose their taste for coffee compared to

But most importantly: if you drill down to the actual data instead of just the abstract – something the MSM never bother with – drinking no cups of coffee a day was also associated with a trend to increased risk of stillbirth compared to drinking 1-3 cups a day, and the increase was around 67% (though barely outside the range of statistical significance). Between 4 and 7 cups a day there was a trend to increased risk (again, not statistically significant wth the tests they used). So from this study, it would seem, if you were the gullible type, that the optimal intake is 1-3 cups a day, and that caffeine abstinence is contraindicated.

I think a lot of these health studies can be safely ignored because they’re done on an observational basis. They have to be, because you can’t cage people and forcibly give them a diet that might induce cancer. But observational studies are notoriously unreliable.

I’m still waiting, though not holding my breath, for a pro-life group to genuinely be about helping the babies – by working to clean up the environment, improving working/living conditions for mothers, improving education, and doing real studies about what might harm the fetus. Meh.

XtinaS, I think you are my new best friend.

The American Academy of Pediatrics classifies alcohol as “a drug generally compatible with breastfeeding.” My pediatrician’s advice? A glass or two is fine … if you feel like you’re too tipsy to hold your infant safely, then you’re probably too tipsy to breastfeed.

European countries (and American non-traditional doctors) have recommended dark beer to increase lactation for CENTURIES.

Alcohol is present in breastmilk at the same concentrations as in blood. http://www.kellymom.com/health/lifestyle/alcohol.html & http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh25-3/230-234.htm (“In general, less than 2 percent of the alcohol dose consumed by the mother reaches her milk and blood. Alcohol is not stored in breast milk, however, but its level parallels that found in the maternal blood.”)

So, if your BAC is .08 that means your breastmilk is 0.08% alcohol. If your BAC is 0.40 (which is the generally recognized threshhold for stupor and death) your breastmilk is 0.40% alcohol. If your BAC is 0.20% (generally recognized as “falling down drunk”) your breastmilk is 0.20% alcohol.

I can’t find the link about the alcohol content of non-alcoholic cider, but I did find it for O’Douls non-alcoholic beer – 0.50%. My memory (which admittedly is faulty) is that apple cider (sold in the US as nonalcoholic) could be up to 0.30% alcohol. I did find that in the UK any drink that is 0.50% alcohol or less is considered “non alcoholic”. It could be that the calculations were done in the UK.

Drinking could be contraindicated for holding an infant, but it’s not contraindicated for breastfeeding unless you are some superhuman who can function at extremely high BAC levels.

Remember all those studies that came out a few years ago that swore up and down that peanut butter was the worst thing you could feed a child under two?

No, I honestly don’t remember those studies. I do remember a lot of hyped-up media articles that, as usual, didn’t bother to do much other than extract a couple of conclusions from the studies and turn them into scare quotes, and people not bothering to read past the headlines.