Gravity-defying hair is very common among babies of Asian and Hispanic
heritage and fairly uncommon among babies of European heritage.  It
stops sticking up after a while no matter what you feed the baby--as it
grows longer and gets heavier, it flattens out.  Or, if it falls out and
grows back, it is usually less gravity-defying.  My own third child(who
we adopted) is Hispanic and had this type of hair as a newborn.  He was
not an allergic baby. (Yes, he was breastfed.) Through the adoption
world, I have known dozens of other babies with this type of hair who
were not particularly allergic. What they had in common was having lots
of straight coarse balck hair and being of Asian or South
American-Native ancestry. My first child, who was extremely allergic,
had very little hair and it lay flat. May be this type of hair is more
highly correlated with allergies in babies of European ancestry (where
it is also less common), but I caution LCS and LLL Leaders not
to use this as a diagnostic tool because it may lead you astray.
Why not stick with the direct, conventional symptoms of allergies,
rather than using a potentially racial biased red herring?
Judy Gelman, IBCLC, LLL Leader
Washington, DC