Food Safety Recommendations for pregnant women

Food Safety Recommendations for pregnant women

Food Safety Recommendations: Good Acceptance
Several of the recommendations presented to the women were readily accepted. These included avoiding raw or undercooked seafood, heating hot dogs, not handling cats, drinking only pasteurized milk, and using cheese and yogurt that was made from pasteurized milk.

Foods Safety Recommendations: Mixed Acceptance
There were a couple of recommendations that received mixed acceptance. One of these involved raw eggs. People generally thought they should avoid raw eggs, but several said they ate raw cookie dough and they liked their eggs runny.

The other behavior that received mixed acceptance was avoiding raw sprouts.
Many of the participants did not typically eat raw sprouts, so for them the recommendation seemed easy. However, for those women who liked raw sprouts, most had not heard of the recommendation to avoid them, and opposition was very strong.

Food Safety Recommendations: Poor Acceptance
There were five behaviors that received relatively poor acceptance. The first three of these are all relatively new recommendations associated with reducing the risk of infection with Listeria monocytogenes.

Most women had not heard of any of these recommendations and assumed that
if a food was sold in a supermarket it was safe to eat. The recommendation to avoid soft cheeses was especially problematic in the Spanish-speaking group due to the popularity of queso fresco.

The recommendation to use a thermometer to make sure meat and poultry were cooked to safe temperatures was also poorly received. The majority of women did not own a thermometer, did not see the benefit of using one, and preferred to rely on visual techniques to determine
doneness.