Much to my surprise, it was incredibly difficult to get accurate and thorough information on which foods to avoid. For instance, most pregnancy books and web sites say to avoid soft cheeses made from unpasteurized milk. This is why cheese aficionados go to great lengths to sneak things like luscious raw-milk Camembert into the country. My parents have a great story about trying to hide a pungent wheel in an overheated overhead compartment on a flight from Normandy, but that's a tale for another day.
But it certainly means that your average pregnant American is not likely to accidentally ingest a soft raw-milk cheese. If you want to eat one in America, you really have to seek it out.
My doctor was not a whole lot more helpful — she just gave me the same info as the books. It seems like there's a real knowledge gap here — most doctors are not food experts, and most foodies don't know the details on pathogens and illnesses.
So I was pretty much on my own. After a lot of research, I finally made my own decisions based on what I could find out.
The results of my research are below — I hope they'll be helpful to other people in my situation. Of course, I'm most certainly not an expert, and some of this comes down to personal comfort with degrees of risk. So I'm definitely not telling anyone what to do. But if you're looking for more information to help you with your decisions, here's what I was able to turn up:.
Cheeses The main risk here is listeria. Listeria is a bacteria that can be found in milk and other foods. See below for the others. It's quite rare in the United States, but when you're pregnant, your immune system undergoes changes that makes it harder for it to fight off infections, which means that, if you did ingest listeria, you'd be more vulnerable to it.
If you did get infected, it would likely cause miscarriage or stillbirth. So, this is a serious issue. The question, then, is how likely are cheeses to contain listeria? It's killed by pasteurization, so with non-raw-milk cheeses, the only danger would be if the milk were recontaminated after it was pasteurized.
According to my research, this is not very likely. Eggs: The risk here is salmonella. Vegetables: Veggies and fruits can be contaminated with salmonella or E. For those of you who've been pregnant, which foods did you choose to avoid? Sarah, Your list is fabulous. I lost my baby due to listeria when I was 19 weeks pregnant in January. I was told to stay away from coffee, not to drink certain herbal teas, blah..
Happiness is the best thing to eat, drink, and live while pregnant! I heated my deli turkey before making a sandwich; babies are worth the paranoia. Welcome to the blandest nine months of your life.
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Candy Addict. Chez Pim. Chicago Tribune. Chubby Hubby. Cooking with Amy. Dave's Kitchen. Desert Candy. Dorie Greenspan. Gurgling Cod. Marion Nestle's Food Politics. Miami Herald.
Nat Decants on Wine. New York Times. Play with Food. Real Food for Healthy Kids. San Francisco Chronicle. Serious Eats. Smitten Kitchen. The Atlantic Food Channel. The BA Foodist. The Ethicurean. The Food Section. The Foodinista. The ND Blog. Vanilla Garlic. Listeria was found in 5. This higher risk of listeria in raw, unheated fish eggs is why pregnant women should avoid eating raw unpasteurized caviar, fish eggs or fish roe.
However, remember that the risk of eating contaminated fish eggs that harbor enough bacteria to get sick is still very low. Listeria symptoms can appear up to 30 days after eating contaminated food, but they usually show up sooner.
Many listeria symptoms are flu-like and include muscular aches, chills, fever, nausea, or vomiting, and diarrhea source: Mayo Clinic. Pasteurization is usually used to make a raw food safe, by heating it to temperatures high enough to kill most pathogens, including listeria. However, fish eggs and roe, including caviar, still need to be refrigerated, even when pasteurized. The type of caviar makes no difference to how much bacteria grows source: Journal of Food Microbiology , so this applies to all fish eggs and roes, no matter what the species.
A Finnish study monitored some pasteurized rainbow trout roe to see if bacteria were able to grow. The conclusion was that pasteurization is an effective method to make fish roe much safer to eat, but fish roe should still be stored at 3C A study also looked at whether the salt levels in salmon caviar or salmon roe made any difference.
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