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).

If you’re one of those people who hate the thought of exercising or simply can’t find the time to head down to the gym or pound the streets new research suggests that simply standing up more can help you keep fit. 

Studies have shown that the body’s metabolism reacts differently when people are standing to when they are sitting, with fat more likely to be burned than stored. The sheer effort of standing upright is enough to double the metabolic rate – and the amount of calories burned. Researchers now say that gentle activity such as pacing around while talking on the phone or tidying cupboards while watching TV is just as important, if not more so, than strenuous exercise.

 

According to the research many activities like talking on the phone or watching a child’s ball game can be done just as enjoyably upright, and you burn double the number of calories when you’re doing it. The jury is still out as far as health and fitness experts are concerned – and many believe that greater health and weight loss benefits – comes from a regular exercise programme such as brisk walking but this study does offer hope to all those who break into a sweat at the mere thought of breaking into a sweat.

Eating fewer refined carbohydrates such as white bread and pasta can slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration or AMD. Scientists at Tufts University in Boston recorded the carbohydrate intake of almost 5,000 men and women aged between 55 and 80 for one year. All the volunteers had varying degrees of AMD which is the leading cause of blindness in the UK. Those who ate the most refined carbohydrates were 17 times more likely to develop AMD than the group that consumed the least.