The salad thing appeared to be true. It’s because salad is often not washed properly or prepared with bare hands not washed properly. It’s more likely to cause food poisoning than chicken…
We ditched a lot of other myths. There was no way my wife was going to drink only hot drinks in singapore. (We were told not to drink cold drinks)
My wife had really bad morning sickness and we were told not to have junk/fried food. But the only food she didn’t throw up was steak and McDonald’s.
Still washed hair / haircut, ate watermelon, didn’t do confinement properly. Etc
At the end of the day most of its rubbish or a valid warning. But nothing to be stressed about.
No, it's common knowledge in Japan that you don't eat raw fish when pregnant.
I don't know why some English websites claim otherwise... all Japanese sources I see agree with me, e.g. this one, supposedly doctor-reviewed: https://woman.mynavi.jp/kosodate/articles/7089
More often than not, most of the stuff I've read that doesn't pass the common sense "sniff test" tends to be based on ridiculously flimsy evidence.
Raw fish consumption in pregnancy is actually recommended in certain countries (Japan being the most notable one). The salad thing is not something I've heard, but a quick Google search shows sources from Singapore, the UK and Australia (except for NSW, for some reason?) all claiming it's perfectly safe.
Going a bit further, the egg thing is based on a single case from the 1950s, follow-up studies on women who got the chicken pox vaccine while pregnant shows that they had a _lower_ incidence of varicella-induced miscarriage, and there's also no evidence that children will get sick if you make their formula using properly treated tap water from a metropolitan source. People in Spain and Italy regularly have a glass of wine with dinner while pregnant; they just don't get shitfaced and everything is OK.
I don't know why all of this pleasure-sucking, stress-inducing bullshit "advice" is accepted by anyone, but I suspect it wouldn't last long if men were the ones who got pregnant.