In her book “Excepting Better”, American scholar Emily Oster wonders about all the things that doctors forbid pregnant women. Sushi, alcohol, coffee … not sure whether they are that bad for the fetus, she says in this controversial work.
Sushi, tobacco, coffee… so many foods that are still prohibited during pregnancy. But where is the scientific evidence that consuming them would be bad for the fetus? In his book Excepting Better published in 2014, Emily Oster, 38, professor at Brown University in Providence, decided to go back to the source of these preconceived ideas. His work is now a hit.
Of course, not everything we hear about pregnancy should be thrown in the trash: tobacco, for example, is certainly harmful to the fetus. However, there is no evidence that moderate coffee consumption can harm the baby, notes Emily Oster in her book. As for sushi, they certainly expose to salmonella, but you don’t need to be pregnant to be affected by this risk. But where the author ofExcepting Better street in the stretchers, it is especially with alcohol. According to her, while it’s safe to drink a lot during pregnancy is risky, no reliable study has ever proven that drinking lightly is. And, while many doctors are concerned when a pregnant woman gains a lot of weight, there is no evidence that it can affect the fetus.
“Pregnancy seems to be a world of arbitrary rules”
It was when she found herself pregnant with her daughter in 2009 that Emily Oster had the idea for such a book. Frustrated by the number of bans imposed by doctors terrified of being sued, she decided to trace the source of these restrictions, analyzing one by one the studies on the subject. She then realized that many of them were based on far too small sample participants, making generalization impossible. “Pregnancy seems to be a world of arbitrary rules. It was like we wanted to buy a house and our real estate agent told us that people without children did not like gardens and therefore decided not to show us any houses. with garden “, she tells Huffington Post at the time of publication ofExcepting Better.
Today, if it bothers and shocks, the latter explodes in bookstores. Since its publication, the book has sold 80,000 copies and has been translated into Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
And Emily Oster’s next book is likely to have a similar echo. Indeed, in this book to be published in April 2019, the academic intends to tackle the sensitive subject of breastfeeding. While the practice is widely recommended by the World Health Organization, Emily Oster is said to have found only one large, rigorous study on the subject.
For her, the data is often skewed by the fact that women who breastfeed are very different from those who do not, the former being often richer and more educated. To isolate the effect of breastfeeding on children, therefore, a “rendomized” experiment (the study of a new treatment in which participants are randomly allocated to the control group and the experimental group) would be needed. , argues Emily Oster. Because according to her, if it is certain that breast milk reduces diarrhea and eczema in the short term, in the long term, there is no evidence that it has positive effects on IQ and childhood obesity.
.
