You don't need to cut out caffeine completely, but don't have more than 200mg a day... if you have, for example, one bar of chocolate and one mug of filter coffee, you have reached almost 200mg of caffeine. Don't worry if you occasionally have more than this amount - the risks are small.
To cut down on caffeine, try decaffeinated tea and coffee, fruit juice or mineral water instead of regular tea, coffee, cola and energy drinks.
Foods to avoid in pregnancy: Caffeine "When you look at more - at six or eight cups of coffee - there is some more evidence that that might be risky."Oster, now the proud mother of a healthy two-year-old girl, has gathered together her work in a book, Expecting Better. She hopes that where the evidence is mixed, readers can consider the facts and make their own decision, based on what they are personally comfortable with.
It is difficult to draw firm conclusions, she says, because most of the studies are not randomised - it wouldn't be fair to divide pregnant women under study into two random groups and ask one group to drink coffee and the other to drink none.
Consequently, Oster says, the people involved in the studies differ in many ways that could affect the course of their pregnancies, not just in their coffee-drinking habits.
"The big issue is that caffeine consumption correlates very strongly with how nauseous you are. A lot of pregnant women are very sick, especially early on - the women who are sicker tend to drink less coffee.
"But we know that being sick is a sign of a healthy pregnancy. And so when we see that women who drink less coffee also have more successful pregnancies we don't really know if that's just about coffee or whether it's really a confounding factor from this nausea."
But coffee was just one item on a long list of forbidden, or semi-forbidden, items that Oster wanted to investigate.
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