The short answer
Cold ready-to-eat meats are the part that needs attention. CDC advises reheating deli meat, cold cuts and similar ready-to-eat meats to 165°F or until steaming hot before eating them during pregnancy, because of Listeria.
That means a sub built from cold cuts is a different order from one built on a filling that is cooked and served hot. Neither is about the brand. Both are about what the meat did in the ten minutes before it reached you.
The toasting trap
Almost every version of this advice online ends at "order it toasted", and that is where it stops being useful.
Toasting browns bread. Bread browns long before meat buried in the middle of a sandwich reaches temperature, so a hot sandwich is not evidence of heated meat. A sub can come out of the oven with a crisp top and cold cuts still cool in the centre, and it will look exactly like the thing you were told to order.
CDC's threshold is a state rather than a setting: 165°F or steaming hot, in the meat itself. So the request that actually matches the guidance is different from the one people are usually told to make.
What to say at the counter
"Could you heat the meat separately until it is steaming hot, then build the sandwich?"
It is a normal request. If the answer is no, that is useful rather than disappointing: it tells you to pick a filling that never raised the question instead of guessing about one that did.
And if the sandwich arrives and you are unsure, opening it and looking is a reasonable thing to do. If the meat is not steaming, the sandwich being hot has not answered the question.
Fillings that sidestep the question entirely
Anything cooked to order and served hot is not in the cold ready-to-eat category at all, so it does not need the heating conversation. Hot fillings such as meatballs in sauce or a steak-and-cheese are prepared and served hot by design.
Vegetarian fillings sidestep it from the other direction. There is no ready-to-eat meat involved, so what remains is a washing question about the salad and a label question about the cheese.
Menus change and vary by country and location, so treat this as a way of reading a menu rather than a list to memorise. The question to ask of any item is simply whether it arrives hot because it was cooked, or cold because it was sliced.
Tuna is two questions, not one
Tuna salad gets asked about more than anything else on a sandwich menu, and the reason it is confusing is that two different concerns are stacked on top of each other.
Listeria. CDC and FoodSafety.gov treat premade, refrigerated deli salads more cautiously for people at higher risk, and a tuna salad held chilled in a counter well is that kind of food. This half behaves like the cold cuts above.
Mercury. FDA and EPA sort fish by species, and canned light tuna sits in a different category from albacore. This half is not affected by heating at all, because mercury is already in the fish tissue. The tuna guide covers which category each type falls into.
Treating them as one question is what produces the contradictory advice people find, where one page says heat it and another says the heating is irrelevant. Both are right about their own half.
Write down what you ordered
If a question comes up weeks later, the useful facts are the filling, whether it was heated, which shop, and when. Those are exactly the details that do not survive in memory, and they are what a clinician will ask for. Nouri keeps them with the rest of your day.
Common questions
Can I eat Subway while pregnant?
The chain is not really the variable. The same question applies at any sandwich counter, and it is about the filling rather than the shop: cold ready-to-eat meats are the ones CDC asks pregnant people to heat until steaming hot before eating. A filling that is cooked to order and served hot does not raise the question in the first place. So the useful version of this question is not whether you can eat Subway, but which filling you are ordering and how hot it will actually be when it reaches you.
Does asking for it toasted make deli meat safe?
Not reliably, and this is the part most advice skips. Toasting browns bread, and bread browns long before meat buried in the middle of a sandwich reaches temperature. A hot sandwich is not evidence of heated meat. CDC's threshold is 165°F or steaming hot throughout the meat itself, so the request that matches the guidance is to have the meat heated separately until steaming, then added.
What should I actually say when I order?
Something like: "Could you heat the meat separately until it is steaming hot, then build the sandwich?" It is a normal request and staff hear versions of it regularly. If they cannot do it, that is genuinely useful information rather than a dead end: it points you toward a filling that never raised the question, such as something cooked to order and served hot, or a vegetarian option.
Is the tuna at Subway safe during pregnancy?
Tuna salad raises two separate questions, and they have different answers. The first is Listeria: CDC and FoodSafety.gov treat premade, refrigerated deli salads more cautiously for people at higher risk, and a tuna salad sitting chilled in a counter well is that kind of food. The second is mercury, where FDA and EPA sort fish by species, with canned light tuna in a different category from albacore. Ask which fish it is if you want to place it, and note that heating does not change the mercury half at all.
What about the cheese and the salad on it?
Both are usually more straightforward than the meat. Cheese sold in this setting is normally pasteurised and processed, which is the category NHS and CDC list among safer choices, though the label is the only place that is settled. Salad vegetables are a washing question rather than a heating one. If the sandwich is going to be heated anyway, that resolves most of what is on it.
I already ate a cold sub. What now?
One cold sandwich is not proof of anything, and there is nothing to fix in retrospect. What is worth doing is writing down what was in it, which shop, and when, while you still remember, because those are the details nobody can reconstruct in three weeks and they are what a clinician would ask for. CDC notes Listeria symptoms usually start within two weeks but can begin as late as ten weeks afterwards.
Related Nouri pages
- The heating checker, if you want the method rather than the menu: microwave, pan, panini, or counter
- Deli meat during pregnancy, including the Listeria window
- How long the watch window runs, if you already ate it cold
- The cheese on it, if that is the part you are unsure about
- Check a product against current recalls
Sources checked on 1 September 2026
- CDC: Safer food choices for pregnant women
- CDC: How Listeria spreads in deli foods and prepared meats
- FDA: Listeria, food safety for moms-to-be
- FDA and EPA: Advice about eating fish
- FoodSafety.gov: People at risk, pregnant women
Nouri is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Subway or any restaurant chain, and this page makes no claim about any particular location. It describes what public-health sources say about cold ready-to-eat meats and how that applies to ordering a sandwich. Menus differ by country and change over time. This page is educational and does not replace your midwife or doctor.