Aim: The aim of the PEAR Study (Pregnancy, the Environment And nutRition) is to help women who are expecting a baby to make confident decisions about what they choose to eat, based on accurate and up-to-date scientific evidence. The results will help us to offer the best advice about food choices to women who are pregnant. For further information, please visit our website.

Background: The PEAR Study is mixed methods observational cohort study of pregnant and postpartum women and of midwives. Pregnant women receive a great deal of health-related information with the aim of optimising the health and the development of the developing baby. Amongst this is guidance on foods to avoid or limit.

What we plan to do: We want to explore how women get advice about what to eat while they are pregnant, and how midwives give women this advice, especially about foods that they might be advised to avoid or eat less of than usual. This study will evaluate understanding of the UK guidance on foods to avoid or limit, assess dietary intakes and provide an evidence-base for clarification and effective dissemination of dietary guidance to enable women to make informed choices about their diet with optimisation of the health and development of the baby.

How we plan to do this: We will be developing and distributing a questionnaire, speaking with women and midwives about their experience of current guidance, recording detailed information on diet, and collecting blood and urine samples to investigate biomarker levels associated with diet.

 If your baby is 12 months old or younger, or you are a midwife who provides antenatal care, we’d like to invite you to help us to test the new questionnaire to make sure it is clear, easy to fill in, and gives us accurate answers.

For further information about the study visit our website at http://pearstudy.com or email pear-study@bristol.ac.uk

Planned outputs - will be posted here when available:

· Academic publication(s)

· Local and national dissemination events

Funding: The work is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), grant number MR/T010010/1.

Ethical approval: The study was approved by the Faculty of Health Sciences Research Ethics Committee at the University of Bristol.