1/2 cans of coke a day - is this really harmful? I'm really struggling to drink anything and the only thing I fancy

[Newtobecomingamum]

Hi,

I usually prefer diet coke but have been told that full fat coke is actually better as contains less chemicles/sweeteners.

I have posted before with struggling to drink as I've got HG and I have tried lots of suggestions of different types of drink and coke seems to be the only thing I fancy to drink... Everything else makes me either feel or physically be sick. I try to have some water.. But do you think 1/2 cans a day is really harmful to baby?

I feel really guilty drinking it, but the only thing I can drink properly.

could you try caffeine free coke (the gold label one) with a teaspoon of sugar in it?

Just carry on drinking coke if you like it and makes you feel better, OP. It will do you and your baby no harm at all.

And drinking coke when you are breast feeding will have no impact on the baby at all either.

At the height of my awful morning sickness I could only keep diet coke and hula hoops down. My midwife said a bad diet is better than puking everything back up and getting nothing. One thing I tried was diluting the coke with water to 'trick' my body into taking more fluid on which helped with the thirst. Hope you turn the corner and feel better soon.

As my first baby was 9lbs 12ozs, I joked to a hospital registrar that I was going to up my caffeine intake in the hope it would make second baby a bit smaller! She replied that maybe I should also take up smoking! I gave her a look at that, but she certainly wasn't worried about me having 2 mugs of tea a day, which is about the same as over 4 cans of coke. Second baby was 10lbs 2ozs, so sadly it didn't work...

Joking aside, at one point in the first trimester this time, almost all I could happily stomach was diet coke or coke zero. If someone had dared to give me a can of ginger beer, I would have deliberately vomited on their feet, as ginger and lemon both make me want to barf when pregnant, despite their wonderful reputation!

But to satisfy the hair shirt brigade, I did try to limit the coke to no more than 2 cans in one day, and to only drink any coke on a couple of days a week when I was feeling really crummy. So I just suffered on some days.

To the OP, one can a day sounds fine to me... anything that gets you through HG is actually good for the baby, one of the worst things for bubs is out of control HG...

Unless you also have a serious espresso habit, 2 cans of coke are way below the max caffeine recommendations. And even those recommendations are not based on undisputed science - there are plenty of studies that did not find that caffeine in pregnancy had any adverse effects.