Hi,
I heard that when a pregnant woman drinks schweppes this can increase the chance of going into labour. Truth or fiction?
Thanks
Out of interest, what do you class as being “Schweppes”? They’ve got loads of different products.
Wives’ tale.
Which means that it might have some thread of truth, but the total degree is unknown, and since women go into labor on their own, eventually, period, no matter what they do or do not do (nobody’s been pregnant forever), and so so largely in the last four weeks of pregnancy (38 -42), the chance of coincidental going into labor after drinking schweppes during those weeks is reasonable.
You might want to check out the Cochrane Medical Abstracts on induction - they’ve got a bunch of wives’ tales actually tested. Go to some site like Medscape.com, register (free, there), search back 70 months for Abstracts with the key words “induction labor” and see how many you get. I don’t recall seeing Schweppes amongst them, so there’s less likelihood that anyone in the medical world (including midwifery) thinks it has any impact. Sex, however, is listed. As is nipple stimulation.
Overall, things that irritate the digestive tract are known to stimulate labor - but you’ve got to really REALLY irritate it. And even then, it isn’t as good as other methods.
Well, if you mean Schweppes Tonic Water, which contains quinine, there could be something to it. This site says that large amounts of quinine it can potentially cause miscarriages, which would be in somewhat the same ballpark.
I’m rather sensitive to quinine myself, and have experience the ringing-in-the-ears effect after only two or three glasses of tonic water. Strangely, however, when mixed with gin it causes no such side effects. 