Dear Gayle, I have worked with several Moms whose babies' primary complaint was incredible constipation. Most of them were allergy related. In the case of one of them the Mother could not have anything that contained dairy in her diet. She began cooking more things from scratch and became a committed label reader. Once she had eliminated dairy from her diet COMPLETELY, the constipation disappeared...despite the ped's skepticism that the two were related. Since a typical Chinese diet probably contains little or no dairy, that is probably not the offending allergen. (What formula was she occasionally supplemented with?) Both my children have food allergies, as do I (the apples do not fall far from the tree!), and when going through the initial allergy evaluation, we had to fill out a questionnaire which asked for us to fill out columns with titles such as "What foods you eat every day", "What foods you eat once or twice a week" , "What foods you eat only occasionally". From the list of foods eaten every day came the list of possible offending foods and the allergist used this as the basis of an elimination diet. I would imagine it is something in this Mom's diet that she is eating every day that is causing this reaction in the baby. I would suggest that she make a list of the things she eats every day, eliminates them from her diet for at least three weeks and then evaluates whether or not that has improved the constipation in the baby. Usually Moms see a rather dramatic result w/in 48-72 hours. After that she should be encouraged to do a challenge, by reintroducing only one food at one time on one day. If after the challenge there is no sign of the constipation, she can rotate the offending foods so that she is not eating them more than every 4-5 days. Also, has anyone in the mother's or father's diet ever had any symptoms of food or other allergies? (This increases the likelihood of the baby having allergies.) {Interesting side note: I (and my two children) are allergic to wheat. So we took advantage of the many non-wheat, non-gluten foods now available in many health food stores. In many cases, the substitute was rice flour. I found I became allergic to rice then after an extended time of using rice flour, rice milk (for the daughter who was also allergic to dairy), rice cakes, etc. For some people, reduction and rotation of the offending allergens is very important.} La Leche League International has a wonderful pamphlet, Allergies (#925-17, $.95) that goes into much more detail. Ann Russell, LLLL IBCLC *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html