 Should pregnant women avoid shower gel? A recent report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists highlighted the challenges of dealing with potential but unproven risks to child health during pregnancy. The report's authors acknowledged that most exposures to environmental chemicals experienced by pregnant women probably pose minimal risk. To be on the safe side though, they suggested a safety first approach that includes, amongst other things, minimizing the use of shower gel, using fresh food whenever possible and not purchasing new cars whilst pregnant. The report is based on growing concerns that the cocktail of chemicals we are exposed to may present risks we are currently unaware of. Certainly, laboratory researchers are covering new information on how some chemicals in everyday products interact with our bodies, and some of these interactions may affect unborn babies more than we previously thought. But much of this research is still far from conclusive when it comes to real effects in people, which leaves pregnant women in something of a quandary. Should you stop doing something that seems harmless and might even be good for you simply because some day the science might show that it wasn't as healthy as you thought. The problem arises in part because we're better at generating data these days than we are at knowing what to do with it. We can measure the minutest amount of a chemical someone is exposed to, and we can research the many ways our bodies interact with these chemicals. But in many cases, we're struggling to stitch the information together to say how relevant it is. It's a bit like discovering for the first time how sausages are made. We don't like what we see, but we can't work out whether that makes sausages dangerous or just distasteful. And this uncertainty makes the risk-benefit trade-offs we face every day tough. How do we find the right balance between what makes our lives better and what makes them worse? And how do we make sure that a decision not to do something like use shower gel or purchase prepackaged foods doesn't lead to a bigger risk than the one we thought we were avoiding? Of course, we're surrounded by things that may cause us harm and someone needs to be making sure we had the best information possible to reduce that harm as far as we can. For substances that seem safe, but may not be, some of that responsibility lies with scientists working to understand possible risks and effective ways of avoiding them. And of course, people potentially at risk should probably be kept in the loop as this research progresses. But we also have to be mindful of the risks of deciding not to do something without thinking through the consequences. So should pregnant women avoid shower gel? Probably not, unless they believe the advantages of using something else or nothing at all are substantially higher, but at the same time we need to make sure that someone somewhere is doing the right research, so that if there are risks, people can make informed trade-offs rather than running blind.