Karen "Tinybites" Hamilton is expecting! As makes sense for a food-blogger, she talks about a lot of the food-and-drink changes this has brought to her life.
And of course, there's the drinking thing. You're not supposed to drink while pregnant, right?
In this Very Special Episode of Wired Cola, we'd like to urge you to drink a little bit. Science is on your side.
Key point from that page: moderate consumption, and we're talking 1-2 drinks/day here, has no measurably negative effect on your baby, and may be modestly better for their development.
The always-reliable (or at least in this case, impressively footnoted) Wikipedia article on the subject is straightforward:
A review of research studies found that fetal alcohol syndrome only occurred among alcoholics; no apparent risk to the child occurred when the pregnant women consumed no more than one drink per day.... An analysis of seven medical research studies involving over 130,000 pregnancies found that consuming two to 14 drinks per week did not increase the risk of giving birth to a child with either malformations or fetal alcohol syndrome.
So there you go. it's ok to drink a bit while pregnant, it's not ok to have an alcohol problem while pregnant. Science is still working on how soon it is acceptable to return to alcoholism after giving birth; when there's a definitive answer, Wired Cola will let you know.
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References
For my own amusement, here's some key links.
The 2009 paper by Yvonne Kelly et al which made the news around the time I wrote this: Light drinking in pregnancy, a risk for behavioural problems and cognitive deficits at 3 years of age? [Answer: probably not. In fact behavioral problems and cognitive performance were slightly better among the children of light drinkers than teetotalers]
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists publication Alcohol and Pregnancy, which I of course favor because it has the most liberal drinking-while-pregnant guideline of all: "Small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy (not more than one to two units, not more than once or twice a week) have not been shown to be harmful."
The document also describes FASD as "a milder form of fetal alcohol syndrome [which] occurs when a woman drinks more than 2 units a day during her pregnancy."
(Note that in the UK, 1 unit of alcohol is about half a pint of 5% ABV beer or 2/3 of a typical glass of wine or a shot of hard liquor. This is, in other words, license to have a twice-weekly "one drink," but no more.)
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