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What to Eat When You're Expecting: Everything You Need to Know to Nourish Both Yourself and Your Baby-to-be
An extensive health and nutritional guide for the expectant and nursing mother, this book includes a section of high-protein, high fibre recipes. It explains nine basic principles for nutritious eating, complete with current data on calories, drugs, additives, minerals and vitamins.
- GenresHealth
336 pages, Paperback
Published February 9, 1989
About the author
Arlene Eisenberg
60 books10 followersArlene Eisenberg was an American author best known for co-authoring What to Expect When You're Expecting (1984), a groundbreaking guide often called the “bible of American pregnancy.” The book’s success led to the best-selling What to Expect series, which has sold over 34 million copies in 30 languages. Eisenberg began her writing career with her husband, Howard Eisenberg, after he encouraged her to write. Together, they published numerous books and articles. Following her death from breast cancer in 2001, their daughter Heidi Murkoff continued the series. The What to Expect Foundation was established in her honor to support low-income families. Eisenberg received multiple awards, including a posthumous Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 2001.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 7, 2009
Too specific and stressful for me to try and follow when I am already pregnant. Maybe if I had gotten the hang of eating this way before I had ANY kids I might be able to stay on top of it. But I got some good nutritional education out of it.
February 20, 2010
Not as useful as I thought it would be. Much like the What to Expect When Your Expecting series, it is disappointing in its lack of information. Good if you have a specific question/need that it just happens to have an answer to.
April 29, 2012
I' m not going to review all the pregnancy books. This one was singularly badly organized and unhelpful.
June 2, 2026
This book is from the 80's, so I'm trying not to hold it up to modern standards, but boy there is a lot of stuff that does NOT hold up well.
The book really sells this "Best-Odds Diet" that the author has come up with as the ultimate blueprint for a pregnancy diet. And I actually think it's a good system overall, because it breaks down foods into nutritional groups called the "Daily Dozen" you can use as a checklist throughout the day. This kind of structured guidance is something I see missing in a lot of other pregnancy nutrition books and is the main positive point I'd give to the book. The term "Best-Odds" does put a bad taste in my mouth though, as it essentially implies that following this diet will prevent a miscarriage or give you a complication-free pregnancy. Not that food doesn't matter when you're pregnant, but some of the "bad" foods mentioned, while not ideal, are considered pretty harmless by most doctors and nutritionists.
I feel like the book could really push someone into disordered eating from the condescending way it's written, especially with the way foods are framed as good or evil with little to no room for moderation, and a lot of the motivation is shame-based. There is a section on "cheating", which allows you to eat an english muffin once a week or ice cream once a month. It essentially treats you like you're poisoning your baby if you consume even the smallest amount of sugar while being weirdly lax about things like deep-fried food. There's a quiz you can take in the beginning of the book to rank your current diet, and I consider myself to eat pretty healthy but I scored something like 30/100 because I had tea with a spoonful of sugar in it every morning (which makes you deduct something like 20+ points). (The other points I lost were mostly from eating white rice/pasta instead of whole wheat, which is fair I guess.) This would be less weird if the book didn't also push juice concentrate as a sugar substitute for pretty much all uses (in both beverages and recipes) even though the sugar content would be comparable. The book also recommends juice as ways of reaching your daily fruit quota, which isn't really considered good advice anymore considering the high sugar content.
I also find the book to be a bit culturally insensitive. It's clearly written for a certain demographic in mind, based on the literal opening line of the book:
There's also an entire section that ranks restaurants in terms of healthiness, mostly based on the cultural it's from. Number one on the list is American cuisine and steakhouses, though to their credit, Indian food is also up there. Lowest on the list are Japanese and Mexican cuisine. Chinese cuisine was "once easily in the Least-Best class" but promoted to "Next-Best". I understand there is some merit to it as certain cuisines have more fried food or processed meat than others, but as a person of color it is kind of wild to see your entire culture's cuisine judged as appropriate or not for pregnancy, when pregnant people live all over the world.
As a small aside, the book also really infantilizes husbands and treats them with the same level of emotional intelligence as children when it comes to eating healthy. They treat them as active barriers to a healthy lifestyle, and some of the nutrition guidance is targeted towards maintaining their health (for example, avoiding eggs due to their cholesterol). I know this is an attitude common during that time period, but I still had to point it out as an annoyance.
Speaking of eggs, the book really hates egg yolks, but still encourages you to eat a lot of eggs. I don't think you could buy plain egg whites when the book was written, so it encourages you to either feed the yolks to your pet or throw them down the sink, which is extremely wasteful and funny to read in a time when egg prices are so high. The part of the book I was most interested in was the recipes, but most of the recipes use extreme ratios of egg whites to regular eggs. It'll be like, 1 egg and 4 egg whites, which makes it really difficult to adapt if you don't want to discard the yolks. I also don't eat eggs, so it's very difficult to convert the eggs into substitutes.
Anyways, I have a lot of problems with this book, and I don't think all of them come from it being 40 years old. There is some decent generic advice on eating healthy, and I do plan to actually try some of the recipes. All in all, it was kind of fun to hate-read, especially since it was a book I got from a library sale (so I only paid a couple cents for it).
The book really sells this "Best-Odds Diet" that the author has come up with as the ultimate blueprint for a pregnancy diet. And I actually think it's a good system overall, because it breaks down foods into nutritional groups called the "Daily Dozen" you can use as a checklist throughout the day. This kind of structured guidance is something I see missing in a lot of other pregnancy nutrition books and is the main positive point I'd give to the book. The term "Best-Odds" does put a bad taste in my mouth though, as it essentially implies that following this diet will prevent a miscarriage or give you a complication-free pregnancy. Not that food doesn't matter when you're pregnant, but some of the "bad" foods mentioned, while not ideal, are considered pretty harmless by most doctors and nutritionists.
Would you pop a chocolate cream from your friend's coffee table into your mouth, guzzle a Coke on a hot afternoon, or order your tuna salad on white instead of whole wheat if you gave a moment's consideration to the consequences? Probably not.
I feel like the book could really push someone into disordered eating from the condescending way it's written, especially with the way foods are framed as good or evil with little to no room for moderation, and a lot of the motivation is shame-based. There is a section on "cheating", which allows you to eat an english muffin once a week or ice cream once a month. It essentially treats you like you're poisoning your baby if you consume even the smallest amount of sugar while being weirdly lax about things like deep-fried food. There's a quiz you can take in the beginning of the book to rank your current diet, and I consider myself to eat pretty healthy but I scored something like 30/100 because I had tea with a spoonful of sugar in it every morning (which makes you deduct something like 20+ points). (The other points I lost were mostly from eating white rice/pasta instead of whole wheat, which is fair I guess.) This would be less weird if the book didn't also push juice concentrate as a sugar substitute for pretty much all uses (in both beverages and recipes) even though the sugar content would be comparable. The book also recommends juice as ways of reaching your daily fruit quota, which isn't really considered good advice anymore considering the high sugar content.
I also find the book to be a bit culturally insensitive. It's clearly written for a certain demographic in mind, based on the literal opening line of the book:
You hope your baby has Daddy's blue eyes and mommy's wavy dark hair
There's also an entire section that ranks restaurants in terms of healthiness, mostly based on the cultural it's from. Number one on the list is American cuisine and steakhouses, though to their credit, Indian food is also up there. Lowest on the list are Japanese and Mexican cuisine. Chinese cuisine was "once easily in the Least-Best class" but promoted to "Next-Best". I understand there is some merit to it as certain cuisines have more fried food or processed meat than others, but as a person of color it is kind of wild to see your entire culture's cuisine judged as appropriate or not for pregnancy, when pregnant people live all over the world.
As a small aside, the book also really infantilizes husbands and treats them with the same level of emotional intelligence as children when it comes to eating healthy. They treat them as active barriers to a healthy lifestyle, and some of the nutrition guidance is targeted towards maintaining their health (for example, avoiding eggs due to their cholesterol). I know this is an attitude common during that time period, but I still had to point it out as an annoyance.
Speaking of eggs, the book really hates egg yolks, but still encourages you to eat a lot of eggs. I don't think you could buy plain egg whites when the book was written, so it encourages you to either feed the yolks to your pet or throw them down the sink, which is extremely wasteful and funny to read in a time when egg prices are so high. The part of the book I was most interested in was the recipes, but most of the recipes use extreme ratios of egg whites to regular eggs. It'll be like, 1 egg and 4 egg whites, which makes it really difficult to adapt if you don't want to discard the yolks. I also don't eat eggs, so it's very difficult to convert the eggs into substitutes.
Anyways, I have a lot of problems with this book, and I don't think all of them come from it being 40 years old. There is some decent generic advice on eating healthy, and I do plan to actually try some of the recipes. All in all, it was kind of fun to hate-read, especially since it was a book I got from a library sale (so I only paid a couple cents for it).
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews