Can I eat dates while pregnant?

The verdict

Yes. Dates are safe to eat at every stage of pregnancy, fresh or dried, whole or blended into something else. No health authority in the UK, United States, Australia or Ireland lists them as a food to avoid, to limit, or to be careful with.

What makes dates unusual is the second half of the question. Almost every food that circulates as a way to bring on labour has nothing behind it. Dates have small clinical trials behind them, and those trials found something. The honest position is neither to dismiss the claim nor to sell it, and this page tries to hold that line.

What the trials actually found

The study people quote is Al-Kuran and colleagues, published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2011. It followed 114 women, 69 of whom ate six date fruits a day for the four weeks before their estimated date of delivery, and 45 of whom ate none.

The date group arrived in hospital further along. Mean cervical dilatation on admission was 3.52cm against 2.02cm. A higher proportion had intact membranes, 83% against 60%. Spontaneous labour occurred in 96% of date eaters against 79% of the comparison group, and use of prostin or oxytocin was lower, 28% against 47%. The mean latent phase of the first stage was shorter, 510 minutes against 906.

Those are real numbers, and they are the reason the claim will not die. They are also from a single small study that was not a blinded randomised trial, in one setting, with women who chose whether to eat dates.

What happened when the studies were pooled

A systematic review and meta-analysis published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth in 2020 pulled eight studies together. Two findings survived pooling. The active phase of labour was shorter by about 109 minutes, and the Bishop score - the standard clinical measure of how ready the cervix is - improved by 2.45 points.

Several findings did not survive. There was no significant effect on the duration of the first, second or third stages of labour taken separately, and no significant effect on the caesarean section rate. The authors' own conclusion is worth reading literally: dates can reduce the duration of the active phase and improve the Bishop score, but because the included studies were of low to moderate quality, further work is needed to confirm it.

So the fair summary is this. Eating dates in late pregnancy may leave the cervix a little riper and may shorten one phase of labour. It has not been shown to start labour, to prevent an induction, to avoid a caesarean, or to make the overall experience shorter. Anyone telling you that six dates a day will get the baby out is going well past the data.

How much is too much

There is no published upper limit for dates in pregnancy, because no authority has identified a hazard to set one against. What does apply is the general free-sugar guidance.

Dates are around 65% to 70% sugar by weight once dried. The NHS puts the adult reference intake for free sugars at no more than 30g a day, and dried fruit counts. Six medjool dates is well over that on its own. The trials used six a day for four weeks in the third trimester, which is a defined short course rather than a habit.

Two practical consequences follow. If you are managing gestational diabetes, a fixed daily dose of dried fruit is a conversation for your diabetes team before you start, not afterwards. And because dried fruit is sticky and sits on the teeth, the NHS advice is to eat it with a meal rather than as a snack between meals.

The one genuinely useful side effect is unglamorous. Dates are high in fibre, and constipation is very common in pregnancy. The NHS advice for constipation is to increase fibre gradually and drink more fluid; dates fit that, and that alone is a better reason to eat them than the labour claim.

Are they safe to eat raw

Yes, with the ordinary produce rules. Fresh dates should be washed before eating, as the NHS asks for all fruit and vegetables, because soil can carry toxoplasma.

Dried dates sold in sealed packets are shelf-stable and low risk. Loose dates from open bins or market stalls have been handled, so rinse them. Date paste and date syrup are just concentrated sugar and carry no separate risk. Stuffed dates are only as safe as what is inside them: a date stuffed with a soft mould-ripened cheese follows the cheese rule, not the date rule.

If you have already eaten a lot of dates

Nothing follows. There is no exposure to report, no test, and no reason to raise it at an appointment. Dates have not been shown to cause early labour, and the trials that fed six a day for a month found no harm.

If you ate dates hoping they would start labour and nothing happened, that is the expected result. The trials measured cervical readiness, not onset. If you are at or past your due date and want things moving, your midwife has options with much better evidence behind them, and a membrane sweep is usually the first of them.

Where guidance differs

It does not. The NHS, ACOG, FSANZ and the HSE in Ireland all leave dates unmentioned, which in documents this detailed is a decision rather than an oversight. These are the same guidance sets that name individual cheese varieties, single out enoki mushrooms and specify tuna in cans per week.

Nor does any of them endorse dates. No national body recommends eating dates to prepare for labour, cites the trials, or suggests a dose. The trial evidence exists in the research literature and has not been taken up into any country's antenatal advice. That gap is the most accurate thing to know about it: promising enough to study, not strong enough to recommend.