Diane:  Thank you for the information about your company's DHA supplement.
I appreciate that you were up front about your position with Martek, which
allows someone like me to take your information as I would that of anyone
representing a company, e.g. a drug rep in my office.  My personal view of
supplements is that, if someone's diet really is deficient, the ideal
remedy is replacing the deficient nutrient with a dietary source.
Therefore, I find it interesting that you did not give us details about
dietary sources of DHA in Japanese and German women's diets which American
women can increase in their own diets.

If (and ONLY if) my independent reading of the
literature convinces me that the American mothers' current DHA levels are
truly too low, then I would like to offer breastfeeding mothers a choice
of increasing them through dietary changes vs. using manufactured
DHA.  However, I am concerned about unnecessarily suggesting to mothers
that they need to change their diets in order to breastfeed, since there
are already too many barriers in the way of mothers' choosing to
breastfeed.  I would rather see more American mothers breastfeed and do so
for longer, even with their current diets, than to provide one more
element of doubt about the nutritional adequacy of human milk into a
culture which facilitates artificial feeding at every turn.  Sincerely,
Alicia Dermer, MD, IBCLC.