The Checkup

Health in the News and in Your Life

Caffeine, Your Baby and You

The question of whether caffeine is safe for pregnant women and their babies continues to be examined. Many experts concur that cutting caffeine altogether is the safest bet for protecting an unborn baby's health, as its consumption may increase the risk of miscarriage, a suspicion supported by research released in January.

A new study published online in the journal BMJ showed that the more coffee a pregnant woman drinks, the greater the risk of her baby's being born underweight. The association held even for those who consumed very little caffeine, less than you'd get from that single cup of coffee per day, and grew stronger with increased consumption.

-- Jennifer Huget

JHBVA wrote:

Yes, work on reducing the caffeine intake. Be smart about your nutrition. But letting research studies stress you out can also increase your risk of a miscarriage and doesn't make sense to me.

Laura33 wrote:

Being pregnant is such an overwhelming, important thing; you want that baby to be healthy more than anything in the world, and yet being pregnant makes you more aware of all those dangers out there that you can't control.

The guy next to me just coughed: Does he have some undiagnosed disease? Does my baby have some chromosomal defect that we don't know about?

I think we focus so much on healthy eating as a way of trying to feel in control -- I can't control whether I get hit by a car, but, dangit, I can keep my baby nitrite-free.

Improving a Woman's Love Life

There's new evidence that women may be able to improve their love lives -- by taking the principal male sex hormone, testosterone.