Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your money!!!!
Review: My husband bought me this book right after we found out we were pregnant for the first time. I was very excited about reading it and find out what is good for my baby. Big mistake. This book makes you feel like the WORST mother-to-be in the world. It's unreal!!! We are not talking about avoiding caffeine, alcohol and cigarettes. Even white rice and pasta are vilans here!!! Are you kidding me? With so much junk food out there I thought I was doing my baby some good eating certain foods. Not according to this book!!!
Let's be real here: we, moms-to-be, try our bests to eat healthy for our bundles of joy. But sometimes we have the right to indulge ourselves with things like ice cream, popcorn and sweets. Moderation is the key.
Do not buy this book, I do not reccommend it at all, it will make you feel bad about yourself and your pregnancy. Just enjoy those 9 months following a regular healthy diet, without reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: a waste of money
Review: I assumed this book would be a no-nonsense approach to eating healthily while pregnant. Instead, it was unrealistic recommendations and sermons about how to be the "perfect" pregnant eater--and don't get me started on that depiction of a pregnant woman on the cover. It seemed like the authors could not resist scolding the reader, imploring women every few sentences not to "cheat" your baby. Pregnant women don't need this! The authors do allow for some "cheating" (puhleez!--bran and cardboard muffins don't count as cheating!), but *still* can't resist making you feel badly about it, saying maybe all you really need is a hug! Agh! The authors also make sure to tell you the perfect/healthy birth weight of their children, achieved through their Best Odds Diet. Use your dollars elsewhere--there are better options.
Rating:
Summary: What To Expect When You Buy This Book
Review: I bought this book because I thought it would help me change my eating habits in a healthier way. It certainly didn't.
Although they make you believe that it's easy to follow their advices at first; it turns out later that it is not.
My husband wanted to help me eating healthy for the baby but changed his mind when he found out how impossible it is.
Might be a good book if you know everything about good nutrition already.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for info
Review: I found that this book did give me a lot of info about what I should be eating while pregnant. I found it very helpful as a source of nutritional information. It did get a bit nazi-esque about the not so good things like sugar. While I did cut back on sugar, reading this book would make you think that eating even one candy bar would doom your child for life. I think that anyone who strictly followed the advice in the book would probably get a raised eyebrow or two from friends and family (One of the suggestions was that you should under no circumstance accept things like cake, even if it is a loved ones birthday or grandma baked it for you.) If you take the book with a grain of salt (or sugar as the case may be) it is extreamly helpful in giving you information about how to eat better.
Rating:
Summary: It¿s Enough to Give You Morning Sickness!
Review: Confusing, Contradictory, and Out-of-Date This entry from the popular What to Expect series will disappoint, confuse, or confound most readers, even fans of series. Although it provides some guidelines, they don't translate into a coherent diet that's possible to actually follow. In a word, it's restrictive, although the authors authorize some cheating. (Yes, once a month you can have a scoop of ice cream or a bran muffin, but NOT both!) Written in 1986, the book packs in plenty of nutritional information, however, it's a safe bet that nutrition and pregnancy guidelines have changed in the past 17 years. Like many diet books, it starts by selling the benefits of the system (and warning of the dire consequences of failure). Following the traditional diet book map, it next evaluates your current eating habits (possibly giving you this score: "Under 70 means you've let everything you ever heard or read about nutrition pass you by. If you want a healthy baby and a comfortable and safe pregnancy, start taking the Daily Dozen as seriously as the Ten Commandments - now.") After scaring you - er - scoring you, the book moves into tips for changing your eating habits. As its cornerstone, it introduces the "Daily Dozen," 12 servings that a pregnant body needs. Unfortunately, it skimps on the guidelines for what equals a serving. The section with examples has only 10 pages and it's buried in the middle of a chapter. Although the authors point out that one food can stand for several servings (milk is a 1/3 of a protein, a calcium, and something else ... I just spent 15 minutes flipping through the book trying to find this part, but I still can't.), they fail to list of such ingredients in a way that's actually useful. In the chapter about what's safe to eat and what's not, I worry about the information being 17 years old (there's no mention of Listeria, but half a page on the Alar scare). There's also a contradiction about alcohol. The authors write, "What it [research] does mean is that a pregnant woman should give up alcohol completely. Don't even use wines or other alcoholic beverages in cooking, since recent research shows that alcohol does not fully evaporate." A few pages later in the recipe section, they include wine in the recipe for Quick Fix Chicken and sherry or Madeira in the ingredients for a Holiday Wassail bowl. Also, the egg nog recipe uses raw eggs. The authors are prejudiced against all refined sugars and honey, although they happily substitute frozen apple juice concentrate to make treats just as sweet. Personally, I don't see much difference between sugar from honey and fruit sugar mixed in water. Although this kind of substitution was popular in the 80's, I don't know if it's effective. In my experience, it just manages to ruin a nice recipe. The appendices include a handful of menus (but not enough), a chart showing the evils of junk food, Chemical Cuisine - a chart that explains common food additives, and several charts describing the nutritional needs of pregnant and lactating women. Personal Experience:
I bought this book before pregnancy to start good nutritional habits. Some of the information in the book was enlightening, but difficult to put into practice without more guidance. I found it confusing, restrictive, and time-consuming. Ultimately I gained weight even though I followed (or thought I followed) pre-pregnancy guidelines. I gave up on the diet long before my pregnancy test came back positive. Instead, I incorporated some suggestions into a simpler, less restrictive diet. This book has good points, including:
*The daily dozen may ensure you get important nutrients, if you can figure out how to follow it.
*The book includes suggestions for dealing with morning sickness. If these suggestions work for you, great. If they don't, you'll probably feel even worse after reading the guilt-trip that you're starving your baby when you can't force down or keep down your whole daily dozen.
*Best Odds Shopping (1st ed., pp. 160-174) provides an overview of misleading information on nutritional labels. True, some of this may have changed with newer label guidelines, but it's still useful information.
*Some of the recipes are great. Favorites include the Quick Fix Chicken, Chicken Au Gratin, Whole-Wheat Pizza, and Better-Than-Milk Shake. A longer recipe section would be helpful.
*The Chemical Cuisine chart is enlightening - although it may include ingredients that have been removed from the market or miss new ones to avoid.
*Tips for women with dietary restrictions are included, but they will probably need to find more specific information elsewhere. With so many cons, I'll just review the key ones:
*Published in 1986, it's out-of-date.
*It includes contradictory information.
*It's unnecessarily confusing and hard to use.
*Poor organization - narrative sections and reference sections should be separated and use more effective layouts.
*More specific guidelines for actually using the diet are needed (better charts of food servings, more recipes, more menus). This may be a book for you if:
*you collect the What-to-Expect series.
*you don't mind being scolded for doing things wrong without being told how to do them right.
*you try restrictive diets as a hobby.
*you have enough nutritional expertise to disregard the parts that are inaccurate, inappropriate and out-of-date. If your diet is already heavy on the wheat germ and you have unlimited time to prepare meals, you won't find this system as much of a chore as a Twinkie-addict would, but there must be better, more recent books available. The Last Word:
No matter who you are, this book should not be your first or only choice for pregnancy nutrition.
Rating: 
Summary: American Women, Expecting or Not Should Follow This Book!
Review: I am just cracking up reading these negative reviews. Especially the ones where the women are so angry about giving up white sugar! Especially when we have a HUGE obesity crisis on our hands which is greatly affecting not only our selves but our children's obesity problems and horrendous eating habits! Specifically our obsession with white sugar!
Rating: 
Summary: good resource
Review: I have mixed feelings, mostly positive, about this book. Debunking the myth of eating for two, this book discusses thoroughly the reality that the extra calories a pregnant woman is permitted to have come from the need for extra protein and extra calcium, so being pregnant doesn't mean overeating. The book also makes the excellent argument that if you eat right, you reduce your risks of complications, increase chance of a better birth and healthier baby, and the weight you gain will be "in the right places" and easier to take off. I appreciated the nutrition information, and as I read it, I wondered how realistic it would be to cook according to these guidelines and to plan a day's menus. The many delicious and uncomplicated recipes, as well as sample menus, were helpful in this regard. The mixed feelings I have about this book are due to the sheer rigor of the proposed diet. It is not realistic for many pregnant women to make all their own sauces, dressings, etc., in order to avoid the sugar and chemical content in foods. My concern is that many who would benefit from the recipes and nutritional information in this book will be discouraged by the strictness of the presentation and feel unable to follow it.
Rating:
Summary: nothing you eat is good enough!
Review: that's the message of this book. the authors prohibit caffeine (from tea or coffee), herbal teas, chocolate, fat, fried foods, refined foods (by which they mean white flour or white sugar), sugar, salt, spices, pretty much anything that one might find on one's plate anywhere one goes. i eat very healthily, and found myself wracked with guilt about every bite. instead, try _the pregnancy cookbook_ (ricciotti & connelly, an OB and a chef), which has recipes for good food that you can actually enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: you gotta be joking
Review: I read this book in conjunction with it's companion, What to Expect When Your Expecting, it was just plain silly. To begin with the recipes were not good. My dog wouldn't eat the things they had me make, and unless you grow your own wheat, and raise your own livestock, this book would have you believe your baby will be born with health problems and you will gain 500lbs. Please. A little common sense goes a long way. DO NOT read this book if this is your first baby or if it's your 10th. Rely on your Dr. or midwife.
Rating:
Summary: Very Little Merit to This Book
Review: I bought this book just before I became pregnant, because I wanted to provide the very best for my baby. At first, I really liked this book because it provided me with great information on how much and what kinds of foods I should be eating daily. The quiz at the beginning of the book really helped me evaluate my daily eating habits, and fine tune them so they could be of maximum benefit to my baby. I think that the only merit of this book is that it did cause me to be more aware of what I'm eating, and more willing to cut out all the sugar, etc. from my diet. However, the usefulness of this book ends with the basic nutritional guidelines at the very beginning. I found out the hard way about how guilty this book makes you feel, particularly during periods of morning sickness in which analyzing your food intake to such an extreme is not only fatiguing, but makes you feel even more sick. I simply did not have the energy or ability to stand in the grocery store for an hour analyzing every single food purchase for its whole wheat content, as this book would have you do. You will set yourself up for failure if you try to follow this book to the letter, and a simple meal out in a restaurant will seem to you like you are putting your child at a high risk for birth defects. I could not enjoy food when I was reading this book, because I spent so much time counting portions. The Bradley Birth nutritional guidelines are much easier to follow, and much more realistic. This book is also sadly behind the times in terms of food safety. This book lists tuna as a great source of protein, but the FDA has warned us about eating tuna more than once per month because of potential mercury poisoning to the unborn child. Sure, the book tells us to check with the EPA about safety guidelines, but how realistic is that? The recipes in the back of the book seemed great to me... until I tried to make one and found that the recipe did not include an oven temperature. Other recipes contain so many ingredients that I could not find at my very-well-stocked grocery store, and we do not have a health food store in my area. The bottom line is, billions of women have given birth to very healthy children without this diet. You can find more realistic nutritional goals by just searching the Internet. Don't waste your money and energy on this book.
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