Yes, you can eat mushrooms while pregnant, and they’re a nutritious addition to your diet as long as they’re properly cooked. Store-bought varieties like white button, cremini, portabella, shiitake, and enoki are all safe when heated thoroughly. The key rule: skip raw mushrooms during pregnancy, especially raw enoki, which have been linked to listeria outbreaks.
Which Mushrooms Are Safe
Common grocery store mushrooms are all fair game during pregnancy. White button, cremini, portabella, shiitake, straw, and enoki mushrooms are widely available and perfectly fine to eat cooked. A clinical trial published in Food & Nutrition Research actually had pregnant women eat 100 grams of white mushrooms daily from before conception through the 20th week of pregnancy, finding that this reduced the risk of pregnancy-induced high blood pressure and oversized babies while helping control gestational weight gain.
The distinction that matters is store-bought versus wild. Commercially grown mushrooms come from controlled environments with clean substrates. Wild mushrooms are a different story entirely, and pregnancy is not the time to experiment with foraging.
Why Cooking Matters
Raw mushrooms can harbor listeria, a type of bacteria that’s especially dangerous during pregnancy. Listeria can cross the placenta and cause miscarriage, stillbirth, or serious infection in a newborn. Pregnant women are roughly 10 times more likely than the general population to get listeriosis.
Enoki mushrooms deserve special attention. The CDC has traced listeria outbreaks directly to raw enoki mushrooms and specifically warns pregnant women not to eat them uncooked. Simply dropping raw enoki on top of a hot soup right before serving isn’t enough. The mushrooms won’t reach a high enough temperature to kill the bacteria. They need to be cooked until steaming hot all the way through.
The NHS echoes this guidance: cooked enoki mushrooms are safe because thorough heating destroys any listeria present. This applies to all mushroom varieties. Cook them fully, whether you’re sautéing, roasting, grilling, or adding them to soups and stews.
Nutritional Benefits During Pregnancy
Mushrooms pack a surprising nutritional punch for a low-calorie food. They’re one of the few non-animal sources of vitamin D, which is critical for your baby’s bone development and your own immune function. Regular mushrooms contain modest amounts (around 10 IU per 100 grams), but UV-treated mushrooms, which are increasingly common in grocery stores, contain dramatically more. USDA testing found that portabella mushrooms exposed to UV light contained 446 IU per 100 grams on average, with some samples reaching over 1,000 IU. Since pregnant women need 600 IU of vitamin D daily, a serving of UV-treated mushrooms can cover a significant portion of that requirement. Check the label for “UV-exposed” or “high in vitamin D” to find these varieties.
Mushrooms also provide B vitamins including riboflavin and niacin, potassium, selenium, and copper. They’re rich in fiber and contain compounds that support healthy blood pressure, which may explain why the clinical trial found benefits for pregnancy-induced hypertension.
Safe Handling at Home
Mushrooms grow in soil-rich environments, so proper handling matters. Wash your hands with soap and warm water before and after handling them. Clean any cutting boards, knives, and surfaces that touch raw mushrooms. The NHS recommends thoroughly washing all vegetables and salads that may have soil on them, and mushrooms are no exception. Store enoki and other fresh mushrooms in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use them, and don’t let them sit at room temperature for extended periods.
Wild Mushrooms and Pregnancy
Foraging for wild mushrooms carries real risks even for experienced gatherers, and those risks intensify during pregnancy. The most dangerous wild species belong to the Amanita family, including the death cap and destroying angel mushrooms, which can be easily confused with edible varieties. A study tracking pregnancies after wild mushroom poisoning found that babies exposed to these toxins had lower birth weights than average, suggesting the poisons may restrict fetal growth. While the rate of birth defects wasn’t higher than the general population, the growth effects are concerning enough on their own.
Wild mushrooms also accumulate heavy metals from the soil, including lead, cadmium, and mercury. Lead is particularly worrisome because it crosses the placenta and accumulates in fetal bones. Commercially farmed mushrooms are grown on controlled substrates that minimize this risk, but wild mushrooms growing near roads, industrial areas, or contaminated soil can concentrate these metals to unsafe levels. Stick to store-bought mushrooms throughout pregnancy.
Psilocybin Mushrooms Are Not Safe
If any part of your search was about “magic mushrooms,” the answer is clear: avoid them entirely during pregnancy and breastfeeding. A 2025 study from UC Davis found that psilocybin had alarming effects on mouse mothers, amplifying anxiety and depressive symptoms rather than improving them. These negative effects persisted for two weeks after just a single dose, and the researchers described the mothers as “dramatically impaired.”
Perhaps more troubling, the offspring raised by treated mothers showed anxiety and depression-like behaviors well into adulthood. Nine weeks after weaning, both male and female offspring still had measurable traces of psilocin (the active compound psilocybin breaks down into) in their brains, along with pronounced anxiety and depression compared to controls. The researchers concluded that even low doses can impact offspring for long periods. Notably, non-pregnant female mice didn’t show these negative effects, suggesting that the hormonal changes of pregnancy and postpartum create a neurochemistry where psilocybin backfires. The compound likely passes through breast milk as well, permanently affecting the offspring’s brain development.