If you take raw and partly cooked shellfish out of the equation, the risk of falling ill from eating seafood is 1 in 2 million servings, the government calculated some years back; by comparison, the risk from eating chicken is 1 in 25,000. (Over all, 76 million cases of food poisoning are reported a year.)

The main risk of illness from non-mollusks isn’t from eating them raw. Rather, as the Institute of Medicine reports, the problem is “cross-contamination of cooked by raw product,” which is “usually associated with time/temperature abuse.” In other words, no matter what you order in a restaurant, if it’s not kept at a proper temperature and protected from contamination, you’re at risk.

Conversely, if the restaurant follows good food safety practices, there is little to worry about. Having been inside the kitchens of dozens of restaurants of all kinds for research, I can say that Japanese kitchens are, on the whole, the cleanest, the most careful and the most conscientious in the business. Moreover, sushi bars are out in the open for all to see, and anybody who has spent a few minutes observing a sushi bar and a typical American diner’s griddle area can tell you which type of restaurant has higher standards of cleanliness.

Sushi may not be cooked, but it has, for the most part, been frozen. Food and Drug Administration guidelines require that before being served as sushi or sashimi (or in any other raw form), fish be flash-frozen to destroy parasites. While the fish you see in the sushi-bar display case looks fresh, it has almost certainly been frozen at some point in the distribution system. This freezing kills any parasites as sure as cooking would.

Most species used for sushi don’t have parasites anyway, though. Fish like tuna are not particularly susceptible to parasites because they dwell in very deep, very cold water, and sushi restaurants typically use farmed salmon to avoid the parasite problems wild salmon have. Most of the fish likely to have parasites, like cod and whitefish, aren’t generally used for sushi. Nor does pregnancy increase susceptibility to parasites. Healthy women who’ve been eating sushi are not at increased risk when they become pregnant. The same resistance and immunities function before, during and after pregnancy.