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Home › Articles › Considering Pregnancy › The Right Way to Get Pregnant

The Right Way to Get Pregnant

By William Grigg

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Women born with a birth defect themselves often worry that their children will be similarly affected. Working with Norwegian scientists, we studied this risk among a half-million Norwegian women (born with defects between 1967 and 1982) and their offspring. Less than 4 percent of the offspring turned out to have birth defects – and generally only at the same level of risk as other women's children. The only significant increase in risk was for having the same defect as the mother's. (In a follow-up study, the offspring of men who had been born with birth defects proved to have an increased risk of the same defect, compared to other men's children, plus an increase in other birth defects, as well.)

The Right Tips
You wouldn't expect this discussion to end without some do's and don'ts, would you? So here (at the risk of a little repetition) are some environmental tips if you are of child-bearing age – from your teen years to menopause:
  • You should not eat swordfish, shark, king mackerel or tilefish while you are pregnant or can become pregnant. These large, long-lived ocean fish accumulate mercury pollution as they eat smaller fish. If you then eat these fish, the mercury can accumulate in you and hurt the development of the nervous system in your unborn child. The FDA also advises you not to eat these big fish when you're nursing a baby – and not to feed these fish to small children.
  • Eat plenty of green, leafy vegetables and swallow a multi-vitamin containing folate, or folic acid (a B vitamin), every day, before and during pregnancy.
  • Avoid soft cheeses. Those delicious brie and Roquefort cheeses, particularly those famous unpasteurized products, are easily contaminated by a tough bacteria called Listeria. Ordinarily, people are not much affected by Listeria, but in pregnant women the bacteria then can cause violent vomiting, flu-like symptoms and loss of your unborn child. This loss can occur even before you know you're pregnant. Mexican-style soft cheeses such as queso blanco, queso fresco, queso de hoja, queso de crema and asadero are susceptible, as are such other soft cheeses as feta or goat cheese, brie, Camembert and blue-veined cheeses such as Roquefort. The Food and Drug Administration recommends that pregnant or potentially pregnant women should instead eat hard cheeses made from pasteurized milk or marked as aged for 60 days or longer.

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