The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has recently altered their recommendations for pregnant women with regards to the levels of caffeine intake, by lowering them from a maximum of 300mg a day to no more than a daily 200mg.

The decision has been prompted by a study that Leicester and Leeds universities will be publishing in the British Medical Journal this week, revealing that caffeine increases the risk of the babies being born with low birth weight. A baby that weighs less than 5 pounds, 8 ounces (2,500 grams) at birth falls into the category of low birth weight infants, the condition being prone to arise either from premature birth ( before 37 weeks of the pregnancy are completed) or fetal growth restriction, which can result from the influence of a factor that has caused the growth of the baby in the uterus to untimely halt.

The main reasons behind low birth weight have been known to be birth defects, chronic health problems in the mother, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and heart, lung and kidney afflictions, smoking (which doubles the risk of low birth weight), alcohol or substance abuse, several uterus infections, viral and parasitic infections in the fetus, including cytomegalovirus, rubella, chickenpox and toxoplasmosis, along with placental problems and inadequate maternal weight gain.

Babies born with low birth weight are more likely to develop respiratory distress syndrome (RDS), intraventricular hemorrhage (bleeding in the brain), patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), a condition entailing that the infant’s shunt that connects the pulmonary artery to the aortic arch remains open after birth, thus the lungs are majorly overworked, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), where portions of the baby’s bowel suffer from tissue death and retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), an abnormal growth of blood vessels in the eye that can lead to vision loss.

Moreover, low birth weight has been linked with higher risk of suffering from several chronic conditions in adulthood, such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

The FSA's chief scientist Andrew Wadge has stated that the new recommended for pregnant women levels of caffeine intake were to be seen as guidance aimed at raising awareness of the medical issues that might result from drinking too much coffee, adding though that the women who had been drinking 300mg of the stimulant per day had no reason to worry that it might affect their babies.

On a related topic, a study that focused on alcohol intake has showed that drinking lightly during pregnancy reduced the risk of behavioral issues and hyperactivity in boys.

The University College London reported that results of their research revealed that light drinkers’ boys scored higher on vocabulary tests than the ones whose mothers had not consumed alcohol at all during the time they were pregnant.