Skipping breakfast wrecks your stomach. Going out with wet hair gives you a cold. Bone soup is full of calcium. Some claims sound self-evident — they've been repeated for decades — but the evidence doesn't back them. This site collects 104 of them, and for each one it spells out: what the truth is, how the claim spread in the first place, and what to do instead.
33 of them can do real harm
104 entries · read 0/104
🩺Body
You'd think
When you're pregnant you must avoid everything — coffee, crab, hawthorn — and ideally stay in bed the whole time
Actually
The evidence-based avoid list in pregnancy is short — alcohol, smoking, raw foods, high-mercury fish. Most taboos have no evidence, and bed rest can actually do harm.
The evidence
The list of pregnancy restrictions with real evidence behind it is short: alcohol (no safe dose), smoking, raw meat and eggs and unpasteurized dairy (listeria, toxoplasma), large high-mercury fish, and caffeine capped at 200 mg a day (ACOG). The long folk list beyond that — crab being 'too cooling', hawthorn 'causing miscarriage', lychees, soy sauce 'darkening the baby's skin' — has no research support. More than half of early miscarriages are caused by chromosomal abnormalities in the embryo, not by anything the mother ate.
Bed rest is the bigger worry. A Cochrane review found no evidence that bed rest prevents miscarriage; trials of activity restriction for preterm-birth risk likewise found no benefit — and bed rest clearly increases the risk of blood clots, muscle loss, and bone loss. ACOG and SMFM do not recommend it as a safeguard. Exercise, on the other hand, is recommended: at least 150 minutes a week of moderate activity for women without complications lowers the risk of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia.
Coffee deserves a caveat: ACOG holds that under 200 mg a day (about one and a half medium Americanos) has no clear link to miscarriage or preterm birth, though some meta-analyses say a dose relationship can't be ruled out. The sensible move is moderation — neither total abstinence nor unlimited refills. Phones and computers, hair dye, and everyday cosmetics are similar: non-ionizing radiation has no evidence of harming a fetus, and the skin absorption from hair dye is far too low to matter.
How it spread
Obstetrics historically ran on a 'what if' logic: any bad outcome could be blamed on something the mother did, so every mishap added one more line to the taboo list. Layer on a culture of pregnancy protection and the quiet stigma around miscarriage, and 'better safe than sorry' snowballs. Many items on the list are essentially rare risks treated as certainties.
What to do instead
Follow the short list: no alcohol or smoking, cook meat and eggs through, drink pasteurized milk, skip high-mercury fish, keep coffee to one small cup a day. Stay active and keep exercising — don't lie still. If you have a cat, delegate the litter box (toxoplasma). For medications and checkups, listen to your OB — not the family group chat.
Can harmFollowing this one can actually make things worseStrong evidence
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