Expecting Better
Why the Conventional
Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong — and What You Really Need to Know
by Emily Oster
The Penguin Press
The pregnancy experience can be distilled down to one word: Don't.
Certain foods are off-limits (no raw fish!). Vices are discarded (no caffeine!). Vanity must be abandoned (no dyeing grays!).
It seems that everyone — doctors, yoga teachers, mothers-in-law and checkout ladies at grocery stores — are members of the pregnancy police. Everyone has an opinion.
But not everyone is Emily Oster, a Harvard-trained economics professor at the University of Chicago who lives with an economist husband and their daughter, Penelope. (Oster's parents are economists, as well.)
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Smoking will never be OK, but pregnant women can drink more alcohol than you'd think — a glass a day after the first trimester! — and enjoy other frowned-upon indulgences.
When she became pregnant in 2009, Oster found the business of birthing woefully lacking in evidence-based reasoning.
"I asked my doctor about drinking. She said that one or two drinks a week was 'probably fine.' 'Probably fine' is not a number," she writes. "The books were the same way. They didn't always say the same thing, or agree with my doctor, but tended to provide vague reassurances ('prenatal testing is very safe') or blanket bans ('no amount of alcohol has been proven safe'). Again, not numbers."
When questioning how much of her beloved coffee she could drink a day, she hit the original research papers and drew her own conclusions, following them through her own pregnancy.
All the established guidelines are often "arbitrary," she discovered. Many habits on the banned list — drinking alcohol in moderation, more coffee than you'd think, using hair dye — haven't been proven to be harmful, while secret dangers like gardening (!) go underexplored.
To help the many women who reached out to Oster for advice, she compiled her conclusions in her new book, "Expecting Better," which she describes as a kind of pregnancy "by the numbers."
"Actually getting the numbers led me to a more relaxed place — a glass of wine every now and then, plenty of coffee, exercise if you want, or not," she writes. "Economics may not be known as a great stress reliever, but in this case it really is."
Initially, coffee was the great motivator in Oster's research.
An ardent coffee fan since her teens, Oster was a four-cup-a-day drinker. When she found out she was pregnant, she wondered how much was really allowed.
Her obstetrician told her to have no more than two cups a day. Another pregnant friend consulted her doctor, who told her not to have any caffeine.
Which was it?
Oster found that both doctors were wrong.
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