Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 29, 2008 at 2:45 PM
Eat more breakfast and you could have a boy!
Last week news outlets from here to Islamabad announced the release of a study purporting to show that women with higher caloric intake and better nutrition at the time of conception are more likely to have boys than girls. Although it’s the father’s sperm that determines the sex of an embryo, the mother’s body can be more or less well suited to that embryo’s thriving.
Goodness knows I’m no scientist, but I’m fairly skeptical about these conclusions. The amount of extra calories that encouraged male embryos seemed rather small, maybe just a few hundred. Perhaps because my own daily caloric intake can swing a few hundred up or down based on one or two small choices, I find it hard to believe that most people eat with reliable consistency. What’s more, the study was based on the women’s own accounts of their diets, and people are famously bad at this kind of self-reporting. I wonder, though, if women desperate for boys will start loading up on cereal and bananas now, and potential mothers yearning for girls will start skipping breakfast.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 4, 2008 at 2:30 PM
Saturday night I went out to dinner with two friends, one who does not have children and one whose daughter just celebrated her first birthday. The former suggested that I might want to order a certain salad, but the new mother said, “No, she can’t have feta! You can’t eat soft cheese when you’re pregnant.” Sheepishly I thought of the occasional salads with pasteurized feta I had been enjoying at home and asked, “Isn’t it okay if it’s pasteurized?” Granting that her doctor is very conservative, she said she had been told to avoid soft cheeses like feta altogether. The week before at a dinner party, another friend (who is a little farther along in her pregnancy than I am) had mentioned her doctor’s opinion that anything pasteurized was safe.
Understanding what is and is not likely to give me listeriosis has been vexing. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there because there aren’t "safe foods" and "unsafe foods"—just relative levels of risk. My two biggest questions have been, "Can I eat pasteurized soft cheeses? And can I eat raw milk cheeses if they are hard and aged, like Parmigiano Reggiano and Gruyère?" I think I’ve finally worked it out, at least well enough for myself.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, February 26, 2008 at 1:15 PM
Last year I got a late Christmas present—on December 26, I found out I was a few weeks pregnant. The very first thing I did was eat a celebratory piece of cheesecake (it’s silly, but I felt as if I was giving the embryo a treat—thank you for implanting!). My second priority was to start reading about what I was actually supposed to be eating, which I suspected was not the cheese enchiladas, endless milkshakes, and french fries I dreamed of as the ideal indulgent pregnancy diet. To prepare for pregnancy, I had already cut out alcohol and started taking folic acid supplements, but how else would I have to change my ways in the months ahead?
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Posted by Alaina Browne, October 4, 2007 at 6:30 PM
- Seafood now said OK for pregnant women: In a major break with current U.S. health advice, a coalition of top scientists from private groups and federal agencies plans to advise pregnant and breast-feeding women to consume at least 12 ounces of fish and seafood a week to ensure optimal brain development of their babies. Since 2001, these groups advised pregnant that women eat no more than 12 ounces a week. [Seattle Times]
- USDA took 18 days to recall meat: The U.S. Department of Agriculture waited 18 days after learning that millions of pounds of ground beef made by Topps Meat Co. could be contaminated with E. coli before it concluded that a recall was necessary, according to an email from an agency inspection official. [Chicago Tribune]
- Another day, another food recall: Some packages of Kraft's Baker's Premium White Chocolate may have salmonella contamination. "The company said the recalled product is in 6-ounce packages with UPC Code 0043000252200 and the following "best when used by" dates: 31 MAR 2008 XCZ, 01 APR 2008 XCZ, 02 APR 2008 XCZ, 03 APR 2008 XCZ." [Reuters]
- Farm gets grant to study which apple bakes best: "The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the farm with a $9,800 grant to assess the baking, drying, browning and growing attributes of 40 apple varieties. 'Then the idea is to tell new organic farmers which trees they can plant,' said Lou Lego, who co-owns the Elderberry Pond farm and restaurant with his wife, Merby." [The Citizen, of Auburn, NY]
- Moscow eliminating food kiosks? Looks like the international war on street food (taco trucks in California, street fare in Toronto) has a new front—the capital city of Russia. [Moscow News Weekly]
- Amsterdam's "space cakes" go animal-friendly: Amsterdam's coffee shops have begun using free-range eggs in their hashish "space cakes." [Belfast Telegraph]
Posted by Ed Levine, July 24, 2007 at 8:16 AM
First Steven Shaw weighed in on pregnancy diet myths (yes, he's a guy, but he's a sensitive fellow), then our own Meg Hourihan responded, and coming up fast on the inside is Jane Brody, with a story titled "Dispelling Pregnancy Myths: Eating for 1.5."
Brody, using the March of Dimes as her Chief of the Pregnancy Nutrition and Safety Police Battering Ram, seems to be spouting just the kind of stuff Shaw and Meg decry. Her basic thesis: "The March of Dimes is making a new push to dispel nutritional misinformation and replace it with advice based on solid scientific evidence. Some of the advice may come as a distressing surprise to women, who may be fond of foods or drinks that could endanger their pregnancy."
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Posted by Ed Levine, July 23, 2007 at 3:10 PM
Serious Eater Meg Hourihan (aka "Megnut") weighs in on the "what to eat when you're pregnant" issue with her usual blend of passion, intelligence, and common sense:
Every pregnant woman needs to find her own balance, and it's not going to be the same for each. For me the anxiety of worrying about what I ate was worse than actually eating it. Early on, I was so worked up I wasn't gaining enough weight. And that's a much worse consequence for a developing fetus.
Why take any risk? Because life is risky. Are you going to stop driving because you're pregnant? Are you going to stop leaving the house? I found my balance between enjoying food and tolerating risk, and it included the occasional Wellfleet on the half-shell. It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the recommendations and to live in fear of every bite of food you put into your mouth. But that makes for a very stressful, anxious, long nine (plus) months. And that certainly isn't good for the fetus.
Meg and her husband, blogger Jason Kottke, brought young Ollie over to Serious Eats world headquarters last week, and he's a cute little bugger. And, as my mother-in-law told me after seeing our son, Will, for the very first time (when he was all of one day old), "I think he's very bright."
Posted by Ed Levine, July 16, 2007 at 6:59 AM
On a sushi-filled New York Times op-ed page, Trevor Corson offers us a prescription for sushi eating in America, and Stephen Shaw says the pregnancy police are all wrong in advising pregnant women not to eat sushi.
Here's what Corson says:
What we need isn’t more tuna, but a renaissance in American sushi; to discover for ourselves—and perhaps to remind the Japanese—what sushi is all about. A trip to the neighborhood sushi bar should be a social exchange that celebrates, with a sense of balance and moderation, the wondrous variety of the sea.
I suggest that customers refuse to sit at a table or look at a menu. We should sit at the bar and ask the chef questions about everything—what he wants to make us and how we should eat it. We should agree to turn our backs on our American addictions to tuna (for starters, try mackerel), globs of fake wasabi (let the chef add the appropriate amount), gallons of soy sauce (let the chef season the sushi if it needs seasoning), and chopsticks (use your fingers so the chef can pack the sushi loosely, as he would in Japan). Diners will be amazed at how following these simple rules can make a sushi chef your friend, and take you on new adventures in taste.
In return, the chefs, be they Japanese or not, must honor the sushi tradition and make the effort to educate us—no more stoicism. They must also be willing to have a candid conversation about the budget before the meal; it’s the only way American diners will be willing to surrender to the chef’s suggestions. Sushi should never be cheap, but it also should never be exorbitant, because that makes it impossible to create a clientele of regulars.
This all sounds well and good, but the idea that sushi chefs will volunteer straight talk about how much a sushi meal is going to cost and abandon their classic stoicism strikes me as a bit of cross-cultural social engineering that just isn't going to fly. Corson is asking sushi chefs to ignore hundreds of years of cultural breeding. Conversely, the idea that Americans shouldn't order what they have clearly demonstrated they like is also not likely to happen. In theory, Corson's prescriptions sound like a persuasive cultural exchange program. In reality, it is not going to happen.
And just when you thought we were finished with sushi there's more.
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Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 2, 2007 at 5:09 PM
"Ben & Jerry might help you get pregnant, but not in the usual way. A diet rich in ice cream and other high-fat dairy foods may lower the risk of one type of infertility, a study suggests. It sounds too good to be true and probably is, some doctors say. But the findings are bound to get attention because they are from the well-known Nurses Health Study at the Harvard School of Public Health and were published Wednesday in the European journal Human Reproduction."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 16, 2007 at 2:32 PM
A study of 9,000 British families has found that the children of women who ate more seafood during pregnancy than the US guideline of 12 ounces a week have significantly more advanced fine-motor, communication and social skills than the children of women who stay within the guidelines or eat no fish at all. "The research suggests that those who avoid fish or do not eat enough of it risk depriving their unborn children of important nutrients that are needed to help brain development. (...) Those children whose mothers had eaten no fish were 28% more likely to have poor communication skills at 18 months, 35% more likely to have poor fine-motor coordination at three-and-a-half, 44% more likely to have poor social behaviour at seven, and 48% more likely to have a relatively low verbal IQ at the age of eight, compared with the children of women who had eaten more fish than advised by the US guidelines."
If you're pregnant, avoid fish at the top of the food chain like sharks, tuna and swordfish as they're more likely to contain pollutants; if you don't like fish or can't have fresh fish regularly, omega-3 supplements are an alternative. (Raw shellfish is listed as a no-no but not raw fish altogether; some but not all Japanese doctors tell women to avoid sushi during pregnancy, but recommend they keep eating fish.)
