Should You Eat Chocolate during Pregnancy?
Should or should you not take chocolate during pregnancy? These are the kind of information that we normally come across and don’t seem to be straightforward. One thing you should keep away from during pregnancy is caffeine. In its website the American Pregnancy Association records caffeine on its page as being one of the food which one should avoid while pregnant and it also has devoted another page entirely for pregnancy and caffeine. The quotes from Babycenter in the March of Dimes cautions women from the high consumption of caffeine and WebMD indicates a study which suggests a link which exists between a high consumption of coffee and more still birth risk.
No doubt chocolate contains caffeine. The amount of caffeine in chocolate varies from one bar to the next and this depends on the type of brand and if the chocolate is dark or milk. One ounce of the dark chocolate has between 5 to 35 caffeine milligrams; milk on the other hand has less of caffeine ranging from 1 to 15 caffeine milligrams in each once.
Should chocolate be avoided during pregnancy be avoided all together?
Well that may not be necessary. The websites that have been mentioned earlier on caution pregnant women from taking caffeine excessively. In addition, they say that if caffeine is taken in moderate amounts it as okay. The main problem is trying to work out what moderate refers to. BabyCenter indicate that it is below three hundred milligrams in a day, while American Pregnancy Association rates it as between one hundred and fifty to three hundred milligrams of chocolate during pregnancy in a day. From the latter, it is clear that women are supposed to steer away from caffeine altogether in the course of the first trimester so that the risks of miscarriage are lowered.
WebMD are in agreement with it. They quote a Danish study which supports the fact that a moderate intake of caffeine in the final two trimesters has no relation to early birth, lower birth weight and miscarriages. Despite all this, evidence leans towards avoiding caffeine and chocolate. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it seems. A study carried out by NewScientist.com in conjunction with other sites from University of Helsinki in Finland discovered that there was some relation between women who took chocolate during pregnancy and the women who avoided chocolate during pregnancy
In addition to this, a summary was done by BBC News from a study which was carried out at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The study which was conducted by a group of scientists discovered that consuming chocolate on a daily basis played part in reducing risks of miscarriages.
So what should you do?
Well the term moderation has surfaced on many occasions in all the studies. Overindulging on chocolate and any other thing for that matter is not healthy irrespective of whether you are pregnant or not. However, doing without chocolate is not a sacrifice which is necessary either. Stress is not good for women who are pregnant and giving up chocolate during pregnancy may be stressful.
