Should pregnant people not drink coffee? The answer is complicated.
Drinking coffee while pregnant has long been considered safe (Fallon Michael/Unsplash/)Pregnant people and their healthcare team should be paying more attention to coffee consumption: that’s one of the messages of a new meta-analysis that builds the case that ingesting any amount of caffeine is associated with negative pregnancy outcomes. But studying coffee consumption is more complicated than you might think, and others in the field of maternal nutrition say it’s not time to start advising people who are pregnant to go cold turkey. Published in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine, the analysis reviews 48 original studies and meta-analyses published over the last 20 years that correlate caffeine consumption and negative pregnancy outcomes or childhood development outcomes. These range from low birth weight, miscarriage, and stillbirth to childhood acute leukemia and childhood obesity. “There is a large body of consistent evidence from well-controlled studies pointing to caffeine as a source of harm during pregnancy,”...