Having food/drink policed whilst pregnant

[ForTheSakeOfFuck]

About three weeks ago, buying a full English takeout for OH...
Cook: "How do you want your eggs?"
Me: "Runny please."
Cook: "Ooooh... you know you shouldn't have runny eggs whilst pregnant. I'll fry it till it's hard." vanishes back into kitchen before I can stop her

Last week, in a pub garden with me, SIL, and OH...
Waiting staff: "What drinks do you want?"
Me: "Two white wines and a coke please."
waiting person returns with drinks
Waiting staff, trying to figure out who to give the drinks to, obviously concludes the wines are for me and SIL: "Ummm... did you want something else? I mean because... you know..."
Me: slightly confused stare since I hadn't twigged yet
Waiting staff: "Is the wine for you?"
Me: "No. It's for MIL else who's arriving imminently. I have a bottle of water in my bag."
Waiting staff: "Oh phew! For a minute there I thought you were going to drink whilst pregnant!" chuckles her way back inside

Today, in Spar, buying my lunch, along with three high-protein peanut bar snack things which actually, for once, are for me, and I've checked with the obstetrician that it's okay for me to eat these since I'm otherwise low on protein in my diet...
Checkout woman, looking at me, very deliberately at my bump, and then at the nutritional content on the bars, literally reading the guidance on there: "Are you allowed to eat these?? I don't think these are okay during pregnancy."
Me in a pretty flat, unimpressed voice: "Are you an obstetrician?"
Checkout woman: "... A what?"
Me: "A specialist in fetal development."
Checkout woman: "... Er... no...?"
awkward silence whilst she scans, I pay, and leave

Sat here, now, chomping on a maple and peanut bar, I feel like a bit of an arsehole in retrospect. So... WIBU to get a bit shirty with the checkout woman?

I've definitely got a fuck off face as this has never happened to me during two pregnancies. I've also never received any unwanted child rearing advice from strangers either!

Aren't these things "recommendations" not "Thou Shalt Not...",

Back in the early 90s ,when I was first pregnant, it was eggs and peanuts, but I didn't completely cut it out.
I went off tea any way. I could only get by on white bread cheese sandwiches and cans of ginger beer with DD, as absolutely everything else made me sick!

DS2 ...I didn't even realise I was pregnant and had been drinking, and had even had a vaccination booster, when starting a new job in a hospital!

Absolutely no problems with any of them.

Just don't go mad and do things to excess!

When I was pregnant and in France I was told in no uncertain terms that alcohol was bad for the baby.

But wine was ok 😂

I find myself taking off my BoB badge and wearing a baggy top to buy sushi. Also need to have stern words with DH regularly as the rules in Russia (where he's from) are frankly bizarre and excessive.

wando your post is just as judgy as some of those from people the OP came up against if not more! Basically anyone who enjoys the taste of wine (or whatever) and drinks a small amount throughout pregnancy must be an alcoholic? It's quite obvious what you were getting at by 'other issues'. Even other women don't trust women to drink a very small amount during pregnancy and keep their baby safe whilst living their life. Fuck sake.

Yanbu. I had someone comment when I ate cooked prawns and cooked camenbert. Now I'm breastfeeding I still get comments if I dare have a small wine!

Chuckling at 'a what?'

Essential is one of them 'don;t drink cold water?' I used to work with a simply wonderful colleague from Kiev, but she was FURIOUS with me when she caught me drinking water from the water cooler. It freezes the baby apparently.

alice yes! I also had to contend with his parents telling me not to get a haircut during pregnancy (??!). But going into a hot sauna was fine apparently!

I also heard not to open any windows (DS was born late August) because the fresh air was dangerous.

(although to be fair we worked in London and the pollution was pretty bad)

Good god! Starbucks won't sell coffee to pregnant women??? Is that in the UK?
Another reason to boycott the smug, tax-avoiding tossers.

Course they will. Some barista has just taken it upon herself to make a judgement call. They serve caffeine to pregnant women....

I hate this. No one else should be policing what another adult is eating.

I wonder whether any of these fuckers would "notice" you are pregnant if they saw you standing on a train?

I have a relative who contracted listeria and lost her baby at five months. This was about 15-20 years ago. She ate something in a restaurant that she shouldn't have but I'm not sure what it was. I don't think the hospital sugar coated it at all, she still has a lot of guilt over it.

I'm pregnant with DC2. That story does stick with me, but I must admit this time around I haven't been as diligent as I was the last time round. It's a really unusual occurrence, what happened to my relative.

I avoid stuff like soft/blue cheese, pate (don't like cheese anyway so no hardship there). I'm careful with making sure meat etc is cooked properly. Hardly had any alcohol at all. A glass of prosecco at my sisters wedding and on Christmas Day, the odd sip of my husbands beer, but that's it. I miss wine 😩

I must admit I don't limit my caffeine intake but I've gone off coffee anyway so not having much of that. Tea is about my only pleasure right now so I'm drinking that when I feel like it (not bucket loads but I'm having more than one a day). I'm not limiting chocolate at all.

Last time round I craved peanuts, and ate snickers till they were coming out of my ears.

Oh also my aunt recently told me off for stretching up to reach a balloon. Apparently you aren't meant to do that while pregnant. Is that true?? I'd never heard that before.

I remember a thread on here a few years ago where a young male barista told a pregnant MNer that she shouldn't be drinking coffee.

Just thinking about it again gives me the rage. I don't even drink coffee!

People get the rules wrong all the time but that doesn't stop them being 'concerned'. I had a craving for mayonnaise with my last two pregnancies. SO many times I got the head tilt 'should you?'.
FFS if mayonise out of a jar, that has been heated and pasteurized to the nth degree poses a risk to my unborn child we should all stay in a darkened room for 9 mths 'just in case'

There is also the confusion as to why you shouldn't.
I.e. if you eat some eggs and you don't get sick YOU ARE FINE. The danger is not in eating the eggs but in getting listeria from infected eggs.
So the eggs are no doing insidious damage to you and your baby every time you walk past one in the supermarket ffs.

I was told that I shouldn't lift my arms above my head incase the cord strangled my baby and never, not NEVER to lie on my back. Or sit on a sofa.

(the freezing process kills the bacteria)

No it doesn't Wando1986. Freezing suspends bacterial growth up to the point of freezing. As the food defrosts, the bacteria will start to multiply again until it is destroyed by heat. The trouble is that the bacteria may have already released toxins, which you cannot destroy by cooking, and are the source of many of the most dangerous forms of food poisoning.

Toxins pass the sniff test. Fish such as tuna used for sashimi can be contaminated by pollutants because they are higher predators so may be a risk, but I wouldn't be bothered because I don't eat it that much. You cannot neutralise heavy metals by cooking either, so it makes no difference that the fish is raw or in a John West tin.

Given that you don't understand that, I'll disregard your pronouncements about alcohol and caffeine intake too.

'Most of the rubbish spouted is from American influence now. '

BULLSHIT! There's never been a ban on nuts in pregnancy here and yet I was told not to have them in the UK when I was pregnant.

And caffeine is fine during pregnancy, 'sorry', just not a lot of it .

Wtf is all this with the pregnancy food police? No cold meats? Caffeine restrictions including chocolate? No occasional glass of wine? Even while pregnant we were allowed to engage our own brains, use a little common sense and make our own judgment calls on the amounts and types of various foodstuffs we ate.

I remember my midwife telling me to drink half a pint of Guinness (yuk) a day. The only real prohibition was smoking back in those days, it really wasn't that long ago, 22 yrs maybe. I was told occasional alcohol was fine as long as I didn't get falling down drunk and no one ever mentioned cold meats or eggs or caffeine - thank imaginary great spirity thing in the sky. As it happened I went right off coffee both times with my pregnancies but I drank gallons of tea and you'd have had to prise my preciouschocolate out of my cold, dead hands! Again WTFuckingFUCK?!

Tracing cunt on the roof of my mouth? Nice thought and I shall do that in future but, during pregnancy, it would have been an impossible feat; since I had the hair-trigger bad-temper reflexes of a bad-tempered reactive rattlesnake while pregnant I'd have got about as far as the top half of the c before leaping across the counter to shake warmly by the throat any interfering, busybodying shop asstwatstant trying to get between me and my chosen food/drink stuff.

Sorry, never been a ban on nuts in pregnancy there but here plenty told me not to have them whilst pregnant.

Plenty of us also drink coffee or tea with no sugar so it's not a 'sugary' drink.

I had an overzealous checkout assistant in a supermarket refuse to sell me a bottle of calpol for the oldest when I was pregnant because 'it was illegal to sell medicines to pregnant women'. Bollocks it was

It was a 50ml bottle of the 120mg/5ml stuff. Iirc an adult dose is 40ml. You'd have to be pretty desperate to do that.

So I popped into the pharmacy in the next street where the pharmacist sold me 200ml of the stuff, a box of paracetamol for myself and while I was at it I picked up my controlled drugs prescription. Of hardcore painkillers.

Jobsworths the lot of them.

We were in Italy near the French border in a restaurant when two tiny (compared with us) Frenchwomen came in. One was definitely pregnant with the most elegant bump you ever saw. They were elegantly dressed and they talked in the most elegant way. They elegantly polished off a HUGE meal of antipasto and raw meat cooked in hot oil and a whacking great pint of Beer each plus a glass of the local digestif after. I wanted to cheer but we were embarrassed enough that we had had to give up on our raclette when only half finished.

Greenhills - I was about to post the exact same thing about Guinness, now I think people would call me an alcoholic for drinking that much.

"Fuck knows how us mums of adult children actually managed to get to term." Not every pregnancy did fewer than before these guidelines came in. It's like those saying 'we never had car seats in our day' no and children were maimed and killed

Caffeine and even moderate alcohol intake is linked to mc/prem birth. The coffee in places like Starbucks is really strong!

The food guidelines on soft cheese etc were at a time when there was issues with certain types of infections.

Vitamin a warning has been around since my mum was pregnant with me!

If it's based in science why wouldn't you follow the guidelines?

I'm making this comment based on fairly limited experience of other countries, but it does seem to me that in the UK we are especially judgmental and the guidance is especially restrictive. My experience of being pregnant in France was that women drank small amounts of alcohol and ate rare steak throughout pregnancy and when I mentioned the British guidance they thought it was ridiculous.

However I have seen that some earlier posters have mentioned some insane-sounding Russian guidance so clearly the UK isn't the worst!!