Is paneer safe during pregnancy?

What does the evidence say about paneer during pregnancy?

1. Fresh, high-moisture cheeses give bacteria more room to grow than aged ones, which is why pasteurization or cooking matters more for this category than for a hard cheese. 1
2. Heating food until it is steaming, at least 165°F or 74°C, kills listeria, which is the state paneer reaches in any simmered curry or grilled tikka. 2
3. In fresh cheese made from raw milk, holding the curd at 65°C for a sustained period left neither salmonella nor listeria recoverable, though the researchers stressed that heating is a backstop rather than a replacement for pasteurizing the milk. 3
4. Risk modeling of fresh cheese found the listeria risk per serving of queso fresco to be about 43 times higher for the pregnancy-related population when made from raw milk rather than pasteurized milk. 4
5. Cheese is one of the three foods supplying most dietary calcium in the United States, against a pregnancy requirement of 1,000 mg a day for adults. 5

Is paneer safe in each trimester?

• First trimester. Paneer is a practical protein if meat has become unappealing, which happens to a lot of people early on. Cooking it into palak paneer or a curry heats it thoroughly, which is the simplest way to stop worrying about how it was made.
• Second trimester. Packaged branded paneer from the refrigerated aisle is pasteurized and labeled. If you buy fresh paneer by weight from a South Asian grocer, ask whether the milk was pasteurized, and cook it rather than eating it raw in a salad.
• Third trimester. Homemade paneer is only as safe as the milk you started with. Bringing milk to a full boil before curdling it is the traditional method and it does the same job, so keep doing that rather than starting from raw milk.