<<This brings me to another wondering - has any connection been found between these babies who stool infrequently as normal breastfed babies and future constipation or problems with stooling as older babies or children? i woudl be really curious and it would be helpful in assuaging moms whose babies have irregular stooling patterns. any thoughts?>> I have said this before on Lactnet and found little agreement, but I still think I am right and people are just stuck on seeing things this way for some reason. It is, IMO, convenient to believe that infrequent stooling is normal. I believe 100% that it is an indicator of some kind of problem, such as food allergies, poor gut motility or the like. I know this means people will write and say that they had a baby who did this who grew into a perfectly healthy child, but you will also have people who artificially fed their babies who will say the same thing. And we know that those kids will likely show the results of artificial feeding later in life. I think the same may be true of kids who stool infrequently. I also think that the way we assess illness or disease in general is flawed in that we don't tend to read the indicators of internal stresses, but instead wait for the big systems failures to notice a problem. Just as an example, how many people out there in the world wake up every morning with excess mucous, but b/c it doesn't really bother them, ignore it? Natural medical practitioners would see this as an indicator of internal problems, potentially allergies.They would not wait for a chronic condition to manifest to tecognize this as a problem.Or how many people walk around with excema and never look for a cause? I wonder what the results would be if everyone whose baby stooled infrequently treated that child with bodywork, homeopathy or some other natural modality? In my very small sample (all of the parents I have been able to convince to treat these babies--probably a dozen or so), the result of treatment has been a normal stooling pattern. I know some people have said this is not proof that there was a problem. What would they say if a baby who was getting artificial milk was stooling once per week and then the baby got only breastmilk and had 5 bm's per day? Would they say there was no corrective property in the breastmilk? Would they say the pattern had been normal? Or would it only be "normal" if the baby were breastfed? I know some people also have babies that have normal stools once per week or so, but in my experience most babies who stool infrequently have very large, explosive, foul-smelling stools. These babies also tend to be gassy. This is not indicative of the theory that the baby is utilizing all of the breastmilk, leaving little waste, but rather indicates waste remaining in the body for lengthy periods of time. I know there are those who are comfortable with the idea that these infrequent patterns are normal and don't want to hear more about it, but it really does concern me, and I think we will come to regret having ignored this situation. Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA *********************************************** 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