Comment by mdorazio
2 years ago
I think it's both funny and sad that you're doing the exact same thing as the "bad" doctors in TFA and then are on here commenting about it. A quick search on Google Scholar for "caffeine pregnancy" reveals a number of studies that show a non-trivial link in humans to increased miscarriage chances, at levels of consumption that realistically occur with heavy coffee drinkers. I.e. your conclusion is not so clear-cut and is based on one (admittedly bad science) thing you read. Example [1][2]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/54/7/203/1...
I don't think that's fair toward me: the bad doctors never told me "do your research, form your opinion". They were always clear cut, they looked up on us for sleeping with our children and they "checked" the breastfeeding checkmark at the hospital even if my wife lamented pain during it and turned out my daughter had a really bad lip/tongue tie that took a month to be solved (with surgery). Notice that medical personnel even told her "you have to endure it, it's normal", as her breasts were cracking and she couldn't breastfeed anymore (had to pump).
I explicitly said, do your research at the end of the message.
P. S. The book might have been one of the following, I can't remember:
Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong--and What You Really Need to Know (The ParentData Series Book 1) from Emily Oyster
What to expect when you are expecting
I think it's the first one. I read many at the same time, so it's hard to remember which one had the information.
The problem that became very salient to me dealing with miscarriage is that women who have healthy pregnancies are also more likely to have problems with morning sickness, and are more likely to avoid things like coffee that are likely to make them feel even more nauseous. Women who have troubled pregnancies that are more likely to end in miscarriage are less likely to feel nauseous and therefore continue to drink and eat things as before.
So it's possible caffeine consumption is a sign of a troubled pregnancy rather than a cause of it. I'm sure there's a point where caffeine becomes problematic but that could be said of a lot of things.
There's a paper in NEJM or JAMA that pointed to this as a likely explanation but it's been a few years and don't have time to look for it now. I think they were looking at timing of caffeine consumption and nausea symptoms?
From your second link:
>The results of this literature review suggest that heavy caffeine use (≥ 300 mg per day) during pregnancy is associated with small reductions in infant birth weight that may be especially detrimental to premature or low-birth-weight infants. Some researchers also document an increased risk of spontaneous abortion associated with caffeine consumption prior to and during pregnancy. However, overwhelming evidence indicates that caffeine is not a human teratogen, and that caffeine appears to have no effect on preterm labor and delivery.