Dear Christine,

"At the recent ILCA conference one of the speakers mentioned the
disadvantage of drinking too much water was that mom would pee more and
therefore lose hormones through urine and possibly reduce supply. All of
our nurses tell moms to drink lots of water to increase supply. Since many
of our moms take this literally and drink beyond thirst in order to
increase their supply I wanted to provide the nurses with the correct info.
Has anyone heard this before and if so could you supply me with some more
background info. Thanks again"

this is mentioned in: Akre, James, ed. "Infant Feeding the Physiological
Basis." World Health Organization, Geneva 1989.  Unfortunately I only have
the German version, so I cannot tell you the exact page in the original
document. It is in chapter 2 at the end of the section "The nutrional needs
of a breastfeeding mother".
Basically it is explained that to much fluid intake results in hampering the
antidiuretic hormone (ADH) doing its job properly, the mother starts to
urinate much more and the milk production is going down. (I hope this says
what I mean as English is not my mother language).

You might refer the nurses to Ruth Lawrence and Robert Lawrence
"Breastfeeding: A guide for the Medical Profession", 6th ed., 2005 p. 325
"Water". In this section you will find the information from an older study
of Illingworht and Kilpatrick, that "the mothers forced to drink beyond
thirst produced less milk, and their babies gained less well".

Denise Both, IBCLC, LLLL
Germany

             ***********************************************

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(R)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html