Cooked, store-bought mushrooms are safe to eat during pregnancy. You won’t find culinary mushrooms on any cautionary pregnancy food list, and they’re widely recognized as a nutritious addition to a whole-foods diet regardless of pregnancy status. The key considerations are cooking them thoroughly, choosing commercially grown varieties, and being cautious with medicinal mushroom supplements.
Which Mushrooms Are Safe During Pregnancy
Common grocery store mushrooms, including white button, cremini, portobello, shiitake, oyster, maitake, enoki, and lion’s mane, are all considered safe when cooked. These varieties are commercially cultivated under controlled conditions, which minimizes contamination risks.
In a randomized clinical trial, pregnant women who ate 100 grams of cooked white button mushrooms daily from before conception through the 20th week of pregnancy had significantly lower rates of gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, excessive weight gain, and gestational diabetes compared to the control group. That’s roughly a cup and a half of sliced mushrooms per day, which suggests that regular mushroom consumption isn’t just safe but actively beneficial.
Why Mushrooms Are Worth Eating
Mushrooms are one of the few non-animal food sources of vitamin D, a nutrient closely linked to pregnancy outcomes. Low vitamin D levels are associated with higher risk of gestational diabetes. A single 75-gram serving of mushrooms exposed to UV light (often labeled “UV-treated” or “high vitamin D” in stores) can provide over 100% of the daily vitamin D recommendation of 10 micrograms. Even after cooking, mushrooms retain 62 to 88% of their vitamin D content, with pan-frying without oil preserving the most.
Mushrooms also contribute meaningful amounts of selenium, an antioxidant mineral. Adding mushrooms to the diet has been shown to increase selenium intake by roughly 19 to 34% across different demographic groups. They’re low in calories, high in fiber, and provide B vitamins and potassium, making them a nutrient-dense choice that fits easily into meals.
Always Cook Them First
Raw mushrooms carry two risks worth taking seriously during pregnancy. First, uncooked mushrooms are harder to digest and may cause gastrointestinal discomfort. Second, undercooked or unwashed mushrooms are more likely to harbor microbes that cause foodborne illness. While no confirmed outbreaks of foodborne illness have been traced to fresh commercial mushrooms, contamination has been detected, and recalls have occurred.
When preparing mushrooms at home, place them in a bowl of water and wash them to remove dirt, since soil-dwelling bacteria are the primary concern. Cook them all the way through. Sautéing, roasting, grilling, and adding them to soups or stir-fries all work. Skip the raw mushroom garnish on salads until after pregnancy.
Medicinal Mushroom Supplements Need Caution
There’s an important distinction between eating mushrooms as food and taking concentrated mushroom supplements. Medicinal mushrooms that double as common culinary varieties, like shiitake, maitake, oyster, lion’s mane, and enoki, are considered safe when eaten as food. The concern is with supplements: concentrated extracts of reishi, chaga, turkey tail, cordyceps, and similar species that aren’t typically part of a regular diet.
Studies on medicinal mushroom supplements during pregnancy are extremely limited. Because of this gap, the standard recommendation is to treat them as potentially unsafe unless they’re also established culinary mushrooms. A reishi capsule and a shiitake stir-fry are not equivalent products. If you’re currently taking a mushroom supplement and want to continue, that’s a conversation to have with your provider about your specific product and dosage.
Avoid Wild and Foraged Mushrooms
Pregnancy is not the time to experiment with wild-foraged mushrooms unless they’ve been identified by an expert. The risk here isn’t theoretical. Poisoning from death cap mushrooms (one of the most commonly misidentified toxic species) has been documented in pregnant women, and the outcomes are concerning. Research on maternal mushroom poisoning shows that while the fetus may not always develop structural abnormalities, infants born after maternal poisoning tend to have lower birth weights, suggesting the toxins can cause growth restriction in the womb.
The toxins in poisonous mushrooms attack the liver, and the treatment required is aggressive regardless of pregnancy status. In reported cases, clinicians treat pregnant women the same way they would treat anyone else, because the fetus is generally more endangered by the poison than by the treatment itself. The simplest way to eliminate this risk entirely is to stick with commercially grown mushrooms from a grocery store or trusted supplier.
Psilocybin Mushrooms and Pregnancy
Hallucinogenic mushrooms pose a distinct set of risks. A 2024 study from UC Davis found that a single dose of psilocybin given to mouse mothers amplified anxiety and depressive symptoms associated with perinatal mood disorders, and these effects persisted for two weeks after just one dose. More troubling, offspring raised by treated mothers showed pronounced anxiety and depression-like symptoms well into adulthood, with traces of psilocybin’s active metabolite detected in their brains.
The researchers believe the drug was passed through breast milk, permanently affecting the offspring’s brain development. The interaction between psilocybin and the hormonal shifts of pregnancy and postpartum is poorly understood, but the ovarian hormones that fluctuate dramatically during this period regulate the same brain signaling pathways that psilocybin targets. This is an area where animal data alone is enough to warrant avoidance. Psilocybin mushrooms should not be consumed during pregnancy or while breastfeeding.