I googled the three questions below and copied the first answer that popped up:
“Can I eat cold cuts while I’m pregnant?”
“The safest course of action to protect your baby is to avoid deli meats until after pregnancy. If you plan to eat deli meats anyway, we highly suggest cooking them until they are steaming. If the meat is heated to steaming, any present Listeria bacteria should no longer be alive.” (American)
“Can I eat sushi while I’m pregnant?”
“You should avoid all raw or undercooked fish when you’re pregnant, though many types of fish are safe to eat when fully cooked. Raw fish, including sushi and sashimi, are more likely to contain parasites or bacteria than fully cooked fish.” (ACOG)
“Can I drink alcohol while I’m pregnant?”
“When Alcohol is Dangerous. There is no safe time for alcohol use during pregnancy. Alcohol can cause problems for the baby throughout pregnancy, including before a woman knows she is pregnant. Alcohol use in the first three months of pregnancy can cause the baby to have abnormal facial features.” (CDC)
Am I the ONLY person who sees a problem?
Cold cuts? No. You can’t eat cold cuts while pregnant. Sushi? No. You can’t eat sushi while pregnant. Alcohol? Well, we don’t want to say “no,” but, well, you know, there’s no safe time to use it…and it COULD cause problems…but we’re not going to say “NO.”
Fifty years ago the first case of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) was diagnosed in the US by David Smith, Kenneth Jones, Christy Ulleland, and Anne Streissguth. (Embryo) And now, fifty years later, we still have lots of room for growth.
For example, we aren’t diagnosing nearly enough cases. It’s not because the cases don’t exist. In fact, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), the umbrella term for all the disorders caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol, seems to be one of the most undiagnosed clusters of disorders possible. There are myriad reasons: lack of knowledge, stigma, shame, misinformation…and the list goes on.
First, we need community awareness. More people need to have a very clear understanding that “You should avoid alcohol when you’re pregnant or trying to get pregnant.”
Next, we need trained specialists. We don’t have nearly enough doctors trained in diagnosing FASDs, and we don’t have nearly enough providers trained in the treatment of FASDs. We don’t have nearly enough individuals who know the effects of drinking during pregnancy.
Finally, we need actual diagnoses. We don’t regularly do enough testing for prenatal alcohol exposure at birth, so we’re missing a huge group of individuals who are affected. A test isn’t going to confirm the presence of an FASD, but it is absolutely going to help a trained diagnostician make that determination.
But why don’t we test as a practice? Sure, it’s attached to stigma, but why? Alcohol is legal, and we can’t easily even get absolutely definitive advice that “You should avoid alcohol when you’re pregnant or trying to get pregnant.”
First, let’s screen everyone for alcohol use and alcohol exposure. Let’s start with One Key Question®: “Would you like to become pregnant in the next year?” (CHCS) If the answer is no, the provider includes a discussion of appropriate care of self, including alcohol and other drug use and effective birth control methods. If the answer is yes, the provider includes discussion around a whole host of topics, as well as introducing advice to reduce/eliminate alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use by either parent while trying to get pregnant, during pregnancy, and, what the heck, postnatally, too, if breastfeeding.
And then let’s test all births…because alcohol is legal, because people don’t immediately know when they’re pregnant, because we haven’t done a great job EDUCATING people about the neurotoxic effects of alcohol. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ten percent of pregnant women in the US reported drinking alcohol in the last thirty days. Of them, a third reported binge drinking. (American) But that’s only what they REPORT. For more definitive information, let’s use umbilical cord testing like that developed by US Drug Testing Laboratories (USDTL.com) to test every neonate. The wealth of information received with the test results would far outweigh the stigma of the information.
Progress IS being made. The government is now funding services to look at alcohol AND other drugs rather than treating one drug (alcohol) as more acceptable than another or one (opioids) more deadly than another. I realize that this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is. FIRST, we’ve spent billions of dollars over years and years acting as though opioids kill the greatest number of Americans from drug use, but that’s not true. Tobacco STILL kills more people than other drugs do, and alcohol STILL kills more people than opioids do. And, despite a concerted effort by our government and lobbyists in the alcohol industry, alcohol is again being recognized as a drug…because it is. But because it’s legal, for far too long we have pretended that it’s harmless.
Time to face the truth.
References
https://americanpregnancy.org/healthy-pregnancy/is-it-safe/alcohol-and-pregnancy/
https://americanpregnancy.org › is-it-safe › deli-meats
http://www.chcs.org/media/OKQ-Webinar-618.pdf
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/discovery-fetal-alcohol-syndrome
Guided by Guida 
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