Customer Reviews

What to Eat When You're Expecting

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Confusing, Contradictory, and Out-of-Date

This entry from the popular What to Expect series will disappoint, confuse, or confound most readers, even fans of series. Although it provides some guidelines, they don't translate into a coherent diet that's possible to actually follow. In a word, it's restrictive, although the authors authorize some cheating. (Yes, once a month you can have a scoop of ice cream or a bran muffin, but NOT both!)

Written in 1986, the book packs in plenty of nutritional information, however, it's a safe bet that nutrition and pregnancy guidelines have changed in the past 17 years. Like many diet books, it starts by selling the benefits of the system (and warning of the dire consequences of failure). Following the traditional diet book map, it next evaluates your current eating habits (possibly giving you this score: "Under 70 means you've let everything you ever heard or read about nutrition pass you by. If you want a healthy baby and a comfortable and safe pregnancy, start taking the Daily Dozen as seriously as the Ten Commandments - now.") After scaring you - er - scoring you, the book moves into tips for changing your eating habits.

As its cornerstone, it introduces the "Daily Dozen," 12 servings that a pregnant body needs. Unfortunately, it skimps on the guidelines for what equals a serving. The section with examples has only 10 pages and it's buried in the middle of a chapter. Although the authors point out that one food can stand for several servings (milk is a 1/3 of a protein, a calcium, and something else ... I just spent 15 minutes flipping through the book trying to find this part, but I still can't.), they fail to list of such ingredients in a way that's actually useful.

In the chapter about what's safe to eat and what's not, I worry about the information being 17 years old (there's no mention of Listeria, but half a page on the Alar scare). There's also a contradiction about alcohol. The authors write, "What it [research] does mean is that a pregnant woman should give up alcohol completely. Don't even use wines or other alcoholic beverages in cooking, since recent research shows that alcohol does not fully evaporate." A few pages later in the recipe section, they include wine in the recipe for Quick Fix Chicken and sherry or Madeira in the ingredients for a Holiday Wassail bowl. Also, the egg nog recipe uses raw eggs.

The authors are prejudiced against all refined sugars and honey, although they happily substitute frozen apple juice concentrate to make treats just as sweet. Personally, I don't see much difference between sugar from honey and fruit sugar mixed in water. Although this kind of substitution was popular in the 80's, I don't know if it's effective. In my experience, it just manages to ruin a nice recipe.

The appendices include a handful of menus (but not enough), a chart showing the evils of junk food, Chemical Cuisine - a chart that explains common food additives, and several charts describing the nutritional needs of pregnant and lactating women.

Personal Experience:
I bought this book before pregnancy to start good nutritional habits. Some of the information in the book was enlightening, but difficult to put into practice without more guidance. I found it confusing, restrictive, and time-consuming. Ultimately I gained weight even though I followed (or thought I followed) pre-pregnancy guidelines. I gave up on the diet long before my pregnancy test came back positive. Instead, I incorporated some suggestions into a simpler, less restrictive diet.

This book has good points, including:
*The daily dozen may ensure you get important nutrients, if you can figure out how to follow it.
*The book includes suggestions for dealing with morning sickness. If these suggestions work for you, great. If they don't, you'll probably feel even worse after reading the guilt-trip that you're starving your baby when you can't force down or keep down your whole daily dozen.
*Best Odds Shopping (1st ed., pp. 160-174) provides an overview of misleading information on nutritional labels. True, some of this may have changed with newer label guidelines, but it's still useful information.
*Some of the recipes are great. Favorites include the Quick Fix Chicken, Chicken Au Gratin, Whole-Wheat Pizza, and Better-Than-Milk Shake. A longer recipe section would be helpful.
*The Chemical Cuisine chart is enlightening - although it may include ingredients that have been removed from the market or miss new ones to avoid.
*Tips for women with dietary restrictions are included, but they will probably need to find more specific information elsewhere.

With so many cons, I'll just review the key ones:
*Published in 1986, it's out-of-date.
*It includes contradictory information.
*It's unnecessarily confusing and hard to use.
*Poor organization - narrative sections and reference sections should be separated and use more effective layouts.
*More specific guidelines for actually using the diet are needed (better charts of food servings, more recipes, more menus).

This may be a book for you if:
*you collect the What-to-Expect series.
*you don't mind being scolded for doing things wrong without being told how to do them right.
*you try restrictive diets as a hobby.
*you have enough nutritional expertise to disregard the parts that are inaccurate, inappropriate and out-of-date.

If your diet is already heavy on the wheat germ and you have unlimited time to prepare meals, you won't find this system as much of a chore as a Twinkie-addict would, but there must be better, more recent books available.

The Last Word:
No matter who you are, this book should not be your first or only choice for pregnancy nutrition.

The backbone of this controversial book is an eating plan -- the "best odds diet" -- that INCLUDES generous amounts of whole grains, dairy products, protein, fruit and vegetables and EXCLUDES all sugars. The authors claim that by following this diet and carefully monitoring one's weight, a woman has the "best odds" of producing a healthy, full-term baby and staying healthy herself.

Women have difficulties with this diet for several reasons. First is the sheer amount of food one is required to eat. Something like 4 dairy servings, 4 protein servings, 5-7 whole grain servings, 2 vitamin C foods, 3 leafy greens/orange foods, etc. Second is the complete exclusion of "sugar", including honey and molasses, with the suggestion that concentrated fruit juices (esp. apple juice concentrate) be used instead. Third is the authors' obsession with limiting weight gain. This book strongly favors staying at the very bottom of a 25-35 pound weight gain, one author boasts of her 20-pound gain (lower than medically advised unless we assume she is overweight), and the only weight-gain charting example is for a minimal gain.

I think many women would make the necessary changes to include the required foods if it were not for the exclusion of sugars and the focus on minimal weight gain, which makes one neurotic about cramming down 7 whole-grain servings each day. Although the authors claim their diet is "scientific" they produce no evidence for it. Their claims rest on studies such as: 1. severely malnourished women produce babies with health problems; 2. a Harvard study found that women with poor diets tend to have babies in poor health, with average diets have babies in average health, and with excellent diets have babies in excellent health; 3. certain food groups need to be included in a well-balanced diet. There are no studies that compare their particular regime with a more moderate one, and they do not give references for their source material so that you can look for yourself. I for one am convinced that the Harvard study women on "excellent" diets probably considered bran muffins a good food, for example, whereas this book considers bran muffins to be a naughty food (you can have them as your weekly treat, if you like). The claim that scientific evidence in any way supports a program as limited as this one is entirely false and unsubstantiated.

Regarding the ban on sugars: this book allows apple juice concentrate to be used in generous amounts, but forbids other sweeteners entirely as "non-nutritive". This is absurd. Check out the label on apple juice concentrate if you think it has any nutritional value at all. Concentrated fruit juices cause the same blood sugar spikes as refined sugars, which is why diabetics can either sip orange juice or have a Lifesaver if they require a blood sugar surge, and they often have negligible food value; it is the blood sugar spikes that can be particularly hard on a body, either yours or your fetus'. Honey, forbidden on this diet, does not cause these blood sugar spikes and has at least as much nutritional value as apple sauce, and in general blood sugar levels will not shoot up if a bit of sugar is included in a balanced meal or tacked on as a spot of dessert. In fact a recent Dutch study found that babies of women who allowed themselves chocolate while pregnant were HEALTHIER than babies of women who didn't.

Finally, the focus on minimal weight gain is just strange and is not helpful in our weight-obsessed society. Pregnant women do best when they are encouraged to focus on health, not staying skinny. Most doctors and midwives advise staying off the scale entirely, so as not to be tempted to deprive your baby of the food it needs to grow well, and instead focus on eating right; your practitioner will let you know if you need to cut back.

I myself am following the Brewer diet (see www.blueribbonbaby.org for a free version, or check out the ivillage article) which is quite similar without the guilt. I do refer to "What to Eat" frequently for the handy lists of foods -- what foods can meet a "leafy green" requirement, for example, or how many blueberries for a full vitamin C serving -- and think it was worth my money for the lists, but wish I hadn't suffered through the guilt to get to them. The book also includes a section of recipes. Some are okay, and I use a version of "Double-the-Milk Shake" (sweetened) most every day, but the baked goods are awful. Don't serve them to company without trying them first.

Herbal tea is dangerous? No white bread? By the time my wife and I had skimmed through "What To Eat..." we were concerned enough with what we read to ask our doctor. He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "Everyone is trying to sell a book," he said. "The way to sell books is to say something extreme." We found that the best way to use this book was to learn the principles (wheat germ and cottage cheese are "efficient" vehicles of nutrition, we found), but not become too alarmed by the extremisim. Buy the book, stock your kitchen pantry as suggested, and even try some of the recipes... but remember to take a deep breath, not panic and use your own common sense when it comes to feeding the life inside you. PS: If you haven't done so already, take a look at the excellent "What To Expect When You're Expecting." It has the balanced, common-sense approach to the whole "baby thing" that this book lacks.

I give a lot of credit to this book for helping me delivery healthy (6 lb. and 7 lb.) twins. My babies were calm and happy. They didn't have colic or ever experience any allergies. When you are pregnant, you are the factory providing the nutrition that your fetus receives. However, I am sure that most people are not really knowledgeable about nutrition and good eating habits. I didn't find this book to be "alarmist", but to be an excellent reference source. "What to Eat When You're Expecting" provides excellent lists of resources (e.g., foods that provide calcium, folic acid, vitamin A, etc), menus, caloric intake recommendations, and recipes. Reading it made me feel that I had some control over the outcome of my pregnancy. when I find out that a friend is pregnant, I insist that she read this book.

A more appropriate title for this book would be, What to Eat When You're Expecting If You Have an Eating Disorder.
Weighing yourself everyday? Ordering broiled meat without sauce in restaurants? "Cheating" by eating a bagel with cream cheese? Sounds an awful lot like the last diet I went on. I brought this book into an appointment with my OB, who said, "Yes, I looked at that book when I was pregnant. I remember thinking, I'm glad I'm a physician, or this would really freak me out."

Expectant Moms: Please, please, do not buy this book. Don't read it. Eat like a healthy, reasonable, HUNGRY human being and follow your doctor's advice. Don't listen to advocates for "a good looking pregnancy," or an author who boasts about gaining only twenty pounds during her pregnancy (five pounds less than the minimum recommendation).

There's enough pressure in this culture to be thin during our ordinary lives. Let's not take it to the point of striving to be thin while we're pregnant. Shame, shame on Heidi Murkoff.

If you think this book is as thorough as the original "What to expect when you're expecting" you will be disappointed. It has amazingly little information about what NOT to eat-- especially in terms of the latest FDA recommendations on fish consumption and mercury. It also lacks important information about harmful herbs and supplements. It seems to be trying to be politically correct--at what cost? Your baby's health? I thought the book "Your pregnancy week by week" by Curtis and Schuler (which I bought at the same time)is much more thorough in all areas. The chapter and tidbits on nutrition are better than this entire book. 2nd time pregnant reader in Charlotte

My husband bought me this book right after we found out we were pregnant for the first time. I was very excited about reading it and find out what is good for my baby. Big mistake. This book makes you feel like the WORST mother-to-be in the world. It's unreal!!! We are not talking about avoiding caffeine, alcohol and cigarettes. Even white rice and pasta are vilans here!!! Are you kidding me? With so much junk food out there I thought I was doing my baby some good eating certain foods. Not according to this book!!!
Let's be real here: we, moms-to-be, try our bests to eat healthy for our bundles of joy. But sometimes we have the right to indulge ourselves with things like ice cream, popcorn and sweets. Moderation is the key.
Do not buy this book, I do not reccommend it at all, it will make you feel bad about yourself and your pregnancy. Just enjoy those 9 months following a regular healthy diet, without reading this book.

I found this book extremely useful as I tried to put together a balanced vegetarian diet during my pregnancy. It explains the necessary nutrients and lists how much of which foods you need to eat to get them. It gets pretty easy to pick out foods that satisfy several needs at once, and to develop your own rules of thumb for putting together a daily diet -- similar to the "four food groups" or "food pyramid" we are more familiar with.

I used my own judgement on the "no white flour or sugar ever" recommendation. I did not have much trouble (after the first trimester, anyway) incorporating what I learned into my daily diet.

If you are considering buying "Vegetarian Pregnancy", for advice on how to eat while you are pregnant, buy this book instead.

I'm not pregnant but I wanted to get a head start on nutrition for when I am.

My biggest disapointment is that since I am dairy intollerant (all dairy, not just lactose) nearly all of their recipies and "quick fixes" for getting calcium have dairy in them, and so are useless to me.

The diet in this book is a relaxed version (yes, really it is) of what you'll find in Dr. Weil's "Eating for Optimum Health" and Dr. Ivker's "Sinus Survival" both of which focus on whole-body heath through careful eating. It was written in 1986 and so is missing over 15 years of changes in nutrition -- tuna more than once a month and polyunsatureated fats are both now in the "not that good for you" list. However, it does have references to find out current info on nutrition if you care to look them up (CSPI). I'm planning to try and move to the "not pregnant or nursing" version of the diet (with modifications for new info) now to insure everything is ready for when I do get pregnant, and because I think it will help my overall health.

Those of you that don't like the tone of the book, try just reading the nutrition part and skip the nagging. Re-write the diet info onto paper without the commentary for later use. They are right about one thing though -- every bite of everything you eat shows up in your baby and you should think about every bite you put in. The nagging does get a bit annoying. Maybe they thought if you feel bad about 1 fast-food meal a month, you'll just have 1 and not 10 like you might if you thought they were no big deal. I think they're just being honest about how most people will react to finding things around the house they're not supposed to eat, which is to eat one thinking it's not a big deal. If you do it only 1 time a week, they say it's not a big deal, but if you do 3 or 4 times a week it is. That logic makes sense to me.

This book is a valuable source of information on health and nutrition for pregnant women. The authors are definitely extreme in their recommendations, but so what!! If you are looking for someone to tell you that ice cream, cheeseburgers, and lattes are good for your baby, then look elsewhere. Here is a diet to whick pregnant women can aspire, and feel proud even if they follow it loosely. If you tend to believe everything you read, then this book will probably frustrate you. If you choose to use this book as a tool to assist you during your pregnancy, then it will probably delight you. Even if you are not a vegetarian, check out Mollie Katzen's vegetarian cookbooks and use them in conjunction with this one. Her recipes are amazing and delicious! If you supplement her recipes with occasional poultry and fish, you will have no problem meeting the Eisenberg's dietary requirements.