Pregnant and salami

1. There are many lists of foods that can and should not be eaten while pregnant. You regularly come across salami on these lists. Salami is a type of sausage in which raw meat is processed. With raw meat, the alarm bells ring for most pregnant women. There is a warning against Toxoplasmosis when eating raw meat. A parasite causes toxoplasmosis that can pose a threat to pregnant women. Yet salami turns out to be less threatening than we all think.

Pregnant and salami

1. Salami is often not recommended for pregnant women because it is made from raw meat. However, this advice is not entirely correct. Namely, the tissue cysts are also inactivated by drying and by salt concentrations higher than 1.1%. Salami is a dried sausage and contains an average of about 3.5 grams of salt per hundred grams of salami. Theoretically, the tissue cysts in salami will be inactivated, so that eating salami cannot cause toxoplasmosis. This means that salami can be eaten during pregnancy.

2. Salami is often not recommended for pregnant women because it is made from raw meat. However, this advice is not entirely correct. Namely, the tissue cysts are also inactivated by drying and by salt concentrations higher than 1.1%. Salami is a dried sausage and contains on average about 3.5 grams of salt per hundred grams of salami. Theoretically, the tissue cysts in salami will be inactivated so that eating salami cannot cause toxoplasmosis. This means that salami can be eaten during pregnancy.