Pregnancy Food Safety: What to Check Before You Eat

A quick guide to pasteurization, cooking, storage, and fish choices during pregnancy, with links to detailed food guides and current CDC and FDA advice.

By Yuriy Stasyuk

Eat thoroughly cooked, cleaned and pasteurized foods to avoid the risk of food poisoning.

Carly Jennings, MD, obstetrician
Nebraska Medicine: What Foods Should You Avoid While Pregnant? Read the original source

The short answer: Check how a food was processed, cooked, and stored before using its nutrient numbers to decide what to eat. CDC's safer food choices for pregnancy cover foods more likely to carry harmful germs. Seafood needs a separate FDA/EPA mercury check. A PregNut food chart cannot verify either one for the product in your kitchen.

Start with three checks

  1. Was it pasteurized? Choose pasteurized milk and juice, and check the milk used in cheese. An unheated queso fresco-type cheese needs extra caution even when its milk was pasteurized. Read the details for milk and yogurt, soft cheese, and juice or cider.
  2. Was it cooked or reheated as needed? CDC lists raw or undercooked meat, eggs, and seafood among riskier choices. It advises heating deli meats, cold cuts, hot dogs, and dry sausages to 165°F or until steaming hot. Check the specific food in our guides to eggs, deli meat, hot dogs, steak and burgers, and refrigerated smoked salmon or lox.
  3. Was it washed and stored safely? Wash fresh produce under running water before preparing or eating it; raw seed sprouts need cooking until steaming hot rather than washing alone. Refrigerate perishable foods promptly and check the storage time for leftovers. See our guides to fresh produce and sprouts.

These checks are a way to find the relevant guidance, not a guarantee that a particular food is safe. For a specific product, follow its label, current recall information, and advice from your prenatal care team.

Fish has two separate questions

Cooking helps address germs; it does not remove mercury. FDA and EPA recommend two to three 4-ounce adult servings a week from their Best Choices lower-mercury fish list, or one serving from the Good Choices list and no other fish that week. Use the current FDA/EPA species chart, then see our lower-mercury fish guide for examples. Raw fish and refrigerated smoked seafood also have preparation concerns, even if the species is lower in mercury. See our guides to sushi, shrimp, and oysters.

What if I already ate something on a riskier-choice list?

Eating a food once does not establish that it was contaminated or that you are ill. If you have symptoms, know the food was recalled, or have a specific exposure concern, contact your prenatal clinician. The CDC pregnancy food-safety chart and FDA Safe Eats guide are the best starting points for current general guidance.

Related guides: pâté and meat spreads, deli salads, cantaloupe and cut melon, raw cookie dough, and raw egg foods.

Sources: CDC safer food choices for pregnancy, FDA Safe Eats, and FDA/EPA advice about eating fish. This guide is educational and does not replace prenatal care.