Seafood during pregnancy

Another day, another confusing article about whether you should, or shouldn’t, eat seafood during pregnancy. (Spoiler alert: you should).

Daily Mail Online is out with “The ten surprising foods you should never eat while you’re pregnant including hot dogs, liquorice and MELONS.”

Almost comically, seafood is included in the list of foods to never eat and in a call-out box of foods you should eat.

Foods worth tucking into

In the And What You Should Be Eating side-bar, “Dr Derbyshire says that while you don’t exactly need to be eating for two (just an extra 200 calories in the 3rd trimester) there are some foods worth tucking into while pregnant.” “…along with oily fish (up to 2 weekly portions) for its essential omega-3 fatty acids are just a few examples of foods that are great to eat in pregnancy.”

The advice in this call-out box is clear: fish, twice per week, is great during pregnancy.

Foods to avoid

Shortly after readers come across the side-bar text with recommendations of foods to eat during pregnancy, including seafood, the list of ten foods to avoid goes on to name “tuna.”

To make things doubly confusing, the article’s recommendation is not actually to avoid the fish. The article says, “Tuna can be eaten in pregnancy but just not too much. Ideally no more than two tuna steaks (140g per steak) or four 140g cans per week should be eaten.”

Confusing readers

To be clear, the What You Should Be Eating call-out box already says pregnant women can, and should, enjoy two oily fish meals per week. Then, in the list of foods to avoid, the article says that tuna, (an oily fish), can be eaten two to four times per week.

The take-away, clearly, is that pregnant women should be eating seafood, including tuna, during pregnancy.

Why tuna is listed as a food to avoid, when the immediate text following reveals it can be eaten during pregnancy is bizarre and strays into the category of making no sense whatsoever.

How this article got through the editorial process with confusing – and conflicting – recommendations about seafood during pregnancy is unknown and unfortunate. Readers are likely to skim through the list, without digging into the content below each food, meaning their take-away will be to incorrectly avoid tuna during pregnancy.

Daily Mail Online should remove tuna from its list of foods to avoid as the same article promotes it as a food “great to eat in pregnancy.”