Tiger nut, bitter kola, garden egg, cloves and Lipton in pregnancy

Short answers first, because you are probably standing in a kitchen. Tiger nut is a food and is fine as a food, but the drink sold in a bottle at the roadside is a different question from the nut. Garden egg is a vegetable and is fine. Cloves in your jollof are fine, and concentrated clove oil is not the same thing. Lipton and every other tea counts towards a caffeine limit, and the bigger issue is drinking it with meals. Bitter kola is the one to leave alone, and the honest reason is that nobody has tested it in pregnant women.

Is tiger nut good for pregnancy?

Tiger nut is a small tuber, not a nut, and it is a food like any other. Eaten as nuts, there is no reason to avoid it in pregnancy. It carries fibre, which is genuinely useful when constipation arrives in the second trimester and everybody pretends it has not.

What it does not do is the long list attached to it online. It will not make your baby fairer, it will not determine the sex, and it will not make labour easier. Nobody has run those studies, and the confidence of the person telling you is not evidence.

The real caution is about kunun aya rather than the nut. A tiger nut drink is soaked, ground, strained and sold unrefrigerated, often made with untreated water and handled by several people. The National Health Service position on unpasteurised drinks is straightforward, which is to avoid them in pregnancy because your resistance to food-borne infection drops while you are pregnant. If you want kunun aya, make it at home with clean water, keep it cold, and drink it the same day.

Is bitter kola safe in pregnancy?

We would leave it. Not because it has been shown to be dangerous, but because it has not been shown to be anything, and that is a different and more honest answer than most pages give.

Bitter kola is a stimulant. That is the point of chewing it, and it is why traders chew it through a long day. A stimulant in a food you eat once is not the same as a stimulant taken deliberately and daily for an effect, which is how it is usually used. No trial has measured what a regular bitter kola habit does to a pregnancy, so anyone telling you it is proven safe, or proven to prevent anything, is telling you something they cannot know.

If you have already been chewing it, do not panic, and do mention it at your next antenatal visit. The useful move is to stop and tell someone, not to carry it as a secret.

Does garden egg have side effects in pregnancy?

Garden egg is a vegetable. Eat it. The searches asking about first-trimester and third-trimester side effects are looking for a danger that the evidence does not describe, and the answer does not change by trimester.

The one thing worth knowing is that raw vegetables carry whatever was on them when they were picked and handled, so wash garden eggs properly in clean water, as you would with any raw produce. That is a hygiene point rather than a garden egg point.

Can cloves cause a miscarriage?

There is no good evidence that cloves used as a spice in food cause miscarriage. The amount of clove in a pot of rice is tiny, it has been eaten in cooking for centuries, and no study connects normal culinary use to pregnancy loss.

Concentrated clove preparations are a separate question. Clove oil, clove water drunk daily as a remedy, or a strong extract taken deliberately are not the same as a spice, and they have not been tested in pregnancy. The general principle holds for every plant on this page. A pinch in food is food, and a concentrated dose taken for an effect is closer to a medicine, which should be discussed with a clinician.

It is worth naming the fear under this question. Most early miscarriages happen because of a chromosomal problem in the pregnancy itself, not because of something the mother ate, drank or did. If you have lost a pregnancy, it was almost certainly not the cloves.

Is Lipton good for a pregnant woman?

Tea is allowed, and there are two real considerations rather than one.

The first is caffeine. The National Health Service advice is no more than 200mg of caffeine a day in pregnancy, and it names tea alongside coffee, cola, energy drinks and chocolate. Tea sits well below coffee per cup, so a few cups a day is not the problem. Counting only the coffee and forgetting the tea, the Coke and the chocolate is.

The second matters more here and is rarely mentioned. Tea drunk with a meal reduces how much iron your body takes from that meal, and anaemia in pregnancy is common across Nigeria. If you are taking iron tablets or eating for iron, the fix costs nothing. Move the tea an hour away from the meal rather than giving it up.

Herbal teas are not automatically safer for being herbal. The National Health Service specifically says to avoid herbal teas containing liquorice root in pregnancy.

How to judge the next thing someone tells you

None of this is unusual, and you are not being gullible. In a study of 595 pregnant women across three Nigerian zones, more than two thirds said they had used herbal medicines. The pressure is real and it usually comes wrapped in love, which is what makes it hard to refuse out loud.

You will be handed more of these, usually by someone who loves you. Three questions sort most of them quickly.

• Is this a food or a dose? Eating a thing is one question. Taking it daily for an effect is a different one, and the second deserves a clinician.
• Is it raw, unpasteurised or sold unrefrigerated? That is a real risk with a real name, and it applies to any drink, not just the traditional ones.
• Is anyone claiming a result, such as an easier labour, a particular sex, a cure? A claim about an outcome needs evidence, and for almost all of these there is none.

None of this means the old knowledge is worthless. It means the specific promises attached to it online were added later, by people selling something or repeating what they read.

Common questions

Sources

• Foods to avoid in pregnancy, including the 200mg daily caffeine limit and liquorice root — National Health Service
• Have a healthy diet in pregnancy — National Health Service
• Anaemia: causes, consequences and who is most affected — World Health Organization
• Iron: how much you need and what affects absorption — National Health Service
• Health and HIV in Nigeria — United Nations Children's Fund
• Attitude and use of herbal medicines among pregnant women in Nigeria, 595 women across three zones — Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, via PubMed Central, 2009
• Community-level factors influencing pregnant women's decisions in Bayelsa State — PubMed Central, 2022