It’s not news that drinking lots of coffee when you’re pregnant isn’t a good idea. But doctors have long been divided about what’s safe and what’s not when it comes to coffee and pregnancy.

Many doctors tell their pregnant patients that one or two 6- to 8oz cups of coffee, tea, or soft drinks with caffeine a day won’t harm the baby but now one new study involving interviews with more than 1,000 pregnant women, suggests that 200mg or more of caffeine (that’s about 2 cups of regular coffee or five 12oz cans of caffeinated soft drink) per day makes it twice as likely that a pregnant woman will miscarry. A quarter of the women who had 200mg or more each day had a miscarriage, versus the 12.5% of women who miscarried and said they hadn’t had any caffeine during pregnancy at all.

 

The study by US Kaiser Permanenate and recently published online in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology found a strong link between caffeine found in coffee, tea, soft drinks and chocolate and miscarriage and the results of the study led the researchers to suggest that women should cut out caffeine or have no more than one cup, especially during the first few months of pregnancy, when most miscarriages happen.

 

My recommendation would be to have none at all for both the man and woman as we know that caffeine can not only increase the risk of miscarriage but drinking as little as one cup of coffee a day can halve the chances of conceiving and one study showed that problems with sperm: sperm count, motility and abnormalities, increase with the number of cups of coffee consumed each day.  (For more information on this and other dietary and lifestyle recommendations for fertility and miscarriage see my new book ‘Getting Pregnant – Faster’, see the Resources Page).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 4:30 am and is filed under In the News, Pregnancy, Tiredness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.