Hi, I’m Lisa. I’m a registered dietitian with Tahoe Forest Health System. I’m also a mom of three, and I want to chat today about food safety in pregnancy. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you do a search for nutrition in pregnancy, the first thing you find is a laundry list of do not eat foods. This can increase stress and anxiety and worry, which is kind of the last thing that we need.
I’ve put together a handout with clear and concise bullet points that can help walk you through all the kind of necessary information and help calm that stress.
Our bodies do a lot of cool things when we’re pregnant. One of them is it adjusts our immune system to accommodate baby since baby’s not part of our body. Because of this adaptation, it does make us more susceptible to illness. Food can contain bacteria and viruses that can cause these illnesses. So, it is important to take more precaution when we’re pregnant than when we’re not.
My first tip is to follow basic food safety guidelines and procedures. Washing your hands before cooking, keeping cooking on a clean space, purchasing food from reputable places, stores, and restaurants that are also following food safety procedures.
A few hot tips for your home kitchen: we don’t want to let food sit out at room temperature for longer than 2 hours. At two hours, we want to put that food back in the refrigerator or throw it out. Leftovers, even if we keep them in the fridge, we want to keep those for only 3 to 5 days. After that, we want to throw them out as well.
Temperatures are really important to keep food safe. Cold temperatures can kill bacteria and viruses, or at least slow their growth down. Hot temperatures can kill them as well. So, we basically want to keep food either in the refrigerator or the freezer, or we want to cook them to the proper temperature. Most of the time, it’s between 145 and 165 degrees. I have those exact temperatures on that handout.
I do recommend using a really inexpensive meat thermometer that you can get at any grocery store to check the cooking temperatures, especially of your animal proteins.
Pasteurization is a heat process that food manufacturers use to kill the bacteria and viruses. I highly recommend looking for that on labels. We’re going to go through a few of these kind of high-risk foods and talk about what would be okay during pregnancy and what we maybe want to limit.
Dairy is one of the first things we really want to look for, that term pasteurized on dairy. We want to avoid unpasteurized dairy, milk, and cheese specifically. Soft cheese is often on that do not eat list. In the US, most soft cheese is made with pasteurized milk, and so that would be okay for you to eat during pregnancy. Imported cheese, cheese we get from other countries, typically is not made with pasteurized cheese, so just double-check that label.
Meat is another high-risk food. We really do want to cook our animal proteins to the proper temperature and not consume raw meat. Keep raw meat separate from cooked foods or produce. Deli meat is also a really common high-risk food. This is a higher chance of containing listeria, which is a bacteria that can harm ourselves and our babies when we’re pregnant. So, we do want to reduce our risk.
I do love a turkey sandwich, though, so I don’t necessarily want to cut out all deli meat. I have a few tips on how we can handle that. I recommend heating deli meat in the microwave and then using it in the sandwich, or doing kind of like a grilled cheese. So, you’re cooking that sandwich and heating that deli meat to steaming.
There are other sandwich options, too, that sometimes we forget about. Doing an egg salad sandwich, a tuna salad sandwich, using hummus or nut butter, or even cooking our own chicken or turkey breast, slicing it thin, and using that in sandwiches can reduce our risk for that listeria infection.
Eggs are another high-risk food, and I love talking about eggs because eggs and all these foods I’ve mentioned so far have a lot of nutrients that our bodies and our babies need during pregnancy. Eggs contain really high-quality protein. They contain a nutrient called choline, which is really important for baby’s brain development. So, I want you to eat eggs. I just want you to cook them all the way through, and I want that yolk to be kind of firm and cooked through.
Another thing with eggs is to watch out for products that might contain raw eggs, such as cookie dough, Caesar dressing, hollandaise sauce, meringue, mousse, and eggnog. That’s a little less common. The good news is these products, when they’re sold in the store, are typically pasteurized.
So, again, look for pasteurized on the label, and those foods would be okay. Where we want to watch out for those is when they’re homemade or maybe made in a restaurant. I always recommend asking about products like that when you’re eating out. If you’re unsure or your server’s unsure, maybe make a different choice.
Seafood is another high-risk food. For the most part, we want to eat cooked seafood, especially shellfish. Shellfish accounts for about 75% of the foodborne illness from seafood. So, things like oysters and clams contain a lot of nutrition that’s great for you and baby. We just want to eat those cooked for now. Raw fish, ideally, to reduce the most risk, should be eaten cooked as well. This always brings up the love of sushi, which I share.
A cool thing about sushi is that, if you go out for sushi and you love sushi, there are a lot of rolls that have cooked proteins in them. So, I’d recommend going that route. In the US, fish served at sushi restaurants has to meet health safety rules for human consumption. So it’s actually usually treated either with a cold process or a chemical process. It’s something you could ask your sushi restaurant about, but to be absolutely safe, I recommend eating cooked fish.
Mercury is another concern when we’re talking about seafood. We do want to limit high-mercury fish. Most of these fish aren’t commonly eaten at home, but maybe they’re eaten out a little bit more. Some of the high-mercury fish are swordfish, shark, king mackerel, and tilefish. I would also limit them and maybe have them occasionally.
Speaking of tuna, canned tuna would be an okay option. Skipjack tuna is fine a few times a week. It again makes a great sandwich. Fish has a lot of really good nutrition for us and baby. I really recommend including salmon or sardines, either fresh or in a can. This is really similar to tuna, and we’re going to get some healthy fats in that.
The last food I want to mention is fruits and vegetables. Most people are surprised to hear that fruits and vegetables are the cause of more than 50% of foodborne illness. We’re not going to tell you to stop eating those. Of course, we need as much of that in our diet as possible, but we just want to proceed with caution. My biggest tip is to wash all produce at home just under cold running water. You don’t need a produce wash.
I would also avoid precut vegetables and fruit unless you’re going to cook it. Unpasteurized juices can be another tricky thing. Ask if juice is pasteurized, looking for that on the label. If you make juice at home in a juicer, that’s going to be unpasteurized. That would be okay, but make sure you wash the produce first before you juice it.
So, those are my top tips. I know it’s a lot of information. Again, I have a really great handout to help guide you through this. It’s available on our website, and I encourage you to check out our other resources there as well.
