Comment by kqr

> How much alcohol can a pregnant person drink? (Not too much, obviously, but is a glass of wine a couple of different days in the third trimester okay? Probably, but it varies a lot deoending on which country you're in.)

It's important to differentiate a low individual risk for you, vs what that means to a whole population.

You will easily find someone willing to say "oh I had two glasses of wine a week while pregnant and my kid was fine".

If everyone started drinking 2 glasses of wine a week in the third trimester, FAS rates will increase, and mean IQ score will dip. Will they dip by a lot? Probably not, but definitely not zero. So of course anyone in a position to make a society-wide recommendation, recommends "no alcohol".

Individual parents may look at data and say, that's a risk they're willing to take.

> But when I was an infant -- which is not that long ago, parents were advised otherwise.

So...research was done and people learned they were wrong?

I'm not quite following what you think the takeaway was here?

The "Back to Sleep" campaigns saw something like a 50% decrease in infant mortality within 12 months in the UK. It isn't really comparable to "fad diet of the year" medical advice.

For sleeping on their back. Our youngest daughter would not sleep on her back. She still sleeps on her tummy with arms folded under her. The only way she sleeps otherwise is in the car seat when properly exhausted. Put her to bed and she will turn around and fall asleep. So what does medicine say then?

> But when I was an infant -- which is not that long ago, parents were advised otherwise

Medicine is wild. Lots of things that were taken as gospel even 15 years ago have been completely flipped on their head. The NHS massively changed their advice last year on asthma treatment and it’s basically the opposite of what they said before. We’ve seen the same with musculoskeletal injuries, nerve injuries and just general recovery.