What percent chance do you deem an acceptable risk of baby death for a specific meal? (which is easily substitutable).
Avoiding certain foods during pregnancy - good advice or just stupid?
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Soldato
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Took the wife to France when she was pregnant, basically everything you would think of to treat yourself to over there she couldn't have, pate, brie, wine, raw egg (in a great deal of typical French desserts), plus all the things they suddenly can't stand the sight/smell of.
Cracking holiday that was :/
Thing is it's just not worth the risk, and to be fair, a great deal of the things they say you are best to avoid when pregnant are probably best to avoid (in excess at least) normally.
Cracking holiday that was :/
Thing is it's just not worth the risk, and to be fair, a great deal of the things they say you are best to avoid when pregnant are probably best to avoid (in excess at least) normally.
Haha
Obviously I would struggle to answer that. Maybe you should list some restricted foods and, using your interpretation of the scientific research, assign each food a % chance that it would result in an infant mortality?E.g. Blue Stilton... 0.0001%?
Maybe then I could make my mind up.
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Avoiding some foods whilst pregnant based ont he best advice at the time seems like the sensible thing to do - it's really not that hard to do and as my wife used to say when pregnant - why take the risk?
There's a reason for that: pregnant women's immune systems are compromised by the pregnancy. You have a parasitic/foreign organism inside you, so your body's natural reaction would be to fight it i.e. to reject it. Reduced immune response lowers this risk, but increases chances of infection.
Avoidance of these foods is partly to protect the mother as well as the foetus.
If the probability was unknown but supporting evidence indicated it could be notable - would it not be prudent to avoid it?.Haha
E.g. Blue Stilton... 0.0001%?
Maybe then I could make my mind up.
While I agree it would be nice to know for certain, in cases when you don't know for certain why would you assume it's 0%?. (or within whatever tolerance bands you have set)
What's the point in having better midwives, doctors and hospitals, if people who think they know better are just going to ignore their advice anyway?
Most midwives, doctors and hospitals use a bit of common sense rather than scaremongering people into avoiding foods due to a possible miniscule risk.
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Elmarko, can I please send you a PM?
No naked pictures please.
Common sense would be to follow the advice given by health professionals
But regardless, as AtticusFinch posted, why take the risk? I'd rather not eat stilton for 8 months than be selfish enough to put my baby's life at risk
Would you drink/allow your partner to drink (alcohol) during pregnancy? After all, there are plenty of people whose mother drank and who turned out perfectly fine...
Yes, it would be prudent, but if we look at the actual evidence, it’s far from conclusive and disputed in many cases. From my browsing so far I’ve seen:
A paper that shows some fish have higher concentrations of mercury than others.
A paper that shows that more mercury can be absorbed by the body by eating certain types of fish.
A paper that shows that excessive mercury can be bad for people’s health, especially children.
Nothing that shows eating a certain type of fish will increase the chance of infant mortality by x% - because you could never calculate that. However, I can understand policy makers concluding that there may be a link between certain types of fish and mercury absorption in unborn children, but extrapolating that to ultimately conclude that fish like sharks and swordfish must never be eaten whilst pregnant? That is not logical.
I don’t assume it’s 0%, everything must have some inherent risk. I can only go by what life has taught me already: is it relatively natural, nutritious and been eaten by humans for quite a while? If so, then I see the risk as relatively low. Some people may argue, why not avoid the foods and find a suitable replacement, nutritionally speaking. Well, my response would be that it’s probably only a matter of time before some ‘researcher’ finds something wrong with the replacement food and you’ve been consuming proportionally more of.
Therefore my preference is to spread the risk; have everything in moderation.
Caporegime
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What Cheesyboy said is what I was going to reply with. Babies don't need more protection than before, babies just you know.... died pretty frequently due to often less healthy pregnancies.
As others have pointed out, we've effectively contaminated lots of the food chain making certain things fairly dangerous. As for things like blue cheese, pregnant women themselves are 20 times more likely to pick up listeriosis than normal. From there you also have a 22% of pregnancy related cases result in the death of a baby(with even more on top of that being born with a variety of potential health problems).
It's not that you have a 1% chance to get listeriosis(flu like symptoms) and that risk is too high for pregnant women, its that for pregnant women the chance increases to 20% and becomes unacceptable(not the actual chances just an example). As with any kind of stress the immune system becomes weakened, growing a baby is more stressful than normal for a woman's body.
Pregnant women have significantly higher chances of picking up infections, bacteria not being destroyed, of the many thousands of types out there, several are highlighted as being particularly damaging with an extremely high risk of a baby dying or being born with severe health issues. To ignore this and just say whatever... I didn't get ill when I ate that when fully healthy, is just stupid basically.
Certain infections may target the heart, others, muscles, others the brain, some are particularly dangerous to foetuses and with this knowledge we can advise people to avoid the source of the worst of them. There is nothing you can get in blue cheese you can't get elsewhere. It shouldn't even be an discussion.
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No naked pictures please.
You do work as an analyst right?
(I'll save the photos til I have a tan)
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As for this argument, I'm a believer in people keeping things normal. The rise in childhood related illnesses and allergies etc I feel is partly due to the molly coddling of people.
HOWEVER, if there are proven health risks for a small variety of things, then you'd be mad as a hatter to engage in the consumption of them.
So what you can't eat blue cheese, there's plenty of other types! You're only giving up a few small things for 9 months?
HOWEVER, if there are proven health risks for a small variety of things, then you'd be mad as a hatter to engage in the consumption of them.
So what you can't eat blue cheese, there's plenty of other types! You're only giving up a few small things for 9 months?
These stats you've got from the NHS website are useless without % chance an unpasterised dairy product has the Listeria bacteria in sufficient quantities? You use 1%, but why?
http://www.food.gov.uk/science/microbiology/listeria/#.U7v-tcmwERA
Upper limit of lab confirmed cases of Listeriosis is 234 per year in UK. That equates to 100*(234/6323000) = 0.0037% of getting Listeriosis. If all the people in the UK were pregnant then the % chance would be 0.074%.
Also people have died from listeriosis in melons too, so do we ban those?
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http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/pages/foods-to-avoid-pregnant.aspx#close
As others have stated stop being a selfish contrarian, even if it only reduces the risk on the unborn child by a tiny percentage any decent human being would make the mild sacrifice!
As others have stated stop being a selfish contrarian, even if it only reduces the risk on the unborn child by a tiny percentage any decent human being would make the mild sacrifice!
Caporegime
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I used 1% because as I specifically stated, it was an example. Your numbers are ludicrous as well, in 99.99999999999999999% of food poisoning people don't do lab tests to confirm what it was. I've had the flu, I don't know, 3-4 times in my life, I lived through it, I didn't go to a hospital, they didn't check which strain of the flu I had therefore lab confirmed numbers for flu aren't indicative of actual real number of cases of it in the wild.
Again the other point is, bacteria/flu doesn't always get you, your immune system may simply deal with it, in fact this is what happens. Not everyone in contact with a flu virus gets ill, same goes for other bacteria. Number of people who come into contact with in this case listeria will be significantly higher than those who get sick with it, which again will be massively higher again than the number of people who are actually tested for it.
If anything, the people who got so sick from listeriosis and actually got tested is likely to contain a very high incidence of pregnant women. Average dude gets ill, even if they go to the hospital it doesn't really matter which bacteria they have in most cases. If it's a pregnant woman in a bad way they are far more likely to confirm what it was.
So ignoring the 0.0037% because it's completely useless, I presume based on fairly wide spread advice, that the chances of getting listeriosis from blue cheese is significantly higher to start with than from getting it from melons.
Either way, you asked why blue cheese, the answer is, it's a potential source of listeriosis which if contracted has an incredibly high chance of killing a baby. Why you're arguing beyond that I don't know.
I didn't say anywhere to never eat food again of any kind in case it gets you, but if something has a higher chance than most other things, and it's particularly bad for babies... then limiting your chances isn't a bad idea. If you don't want to limit your chance, go for it. People run across roads in front of cars without looking every day, the vast majority don't die, that doesn't mean I'm going to do it because the chances are low that I will die. It's EASY to avoid doing it, and reduces the risk of me dying from running in front of traffic to zero. I might die when from a meteor landing on me, doesn't make it okay to run in front of traffic though which is basically your argument.
But Y might kill you anyway, so you may as well do X.... no thanks.
So are loads of other diseases probably? Until we know the likelihood some blue cheese has the bacteria in (in sufficient quantities), this argument is pointless.
All I'm doing is challenging conventional 'wisdom' and so far I'm not seeing any evidence that eating a balanced diet (including some of the restricted foods) is going to increase risk in any meaningful way.