I think life teaches us all the time that people's own individual
experiences can go against what we see in research and scientific enquiry.
So it's perfectly possible that for some individual women, diet (quantity
and quality and certain foodstuffs) and fluid intake could affect their bf.

What irritates me, though, is that all sorts of people (mothers included,
of course) can blame food or fluid (or lack of it) for unhappy
breastfeeding - before the most very basic things like unrestricted
feeding, 'finish the first breast first', night feeds, positioning and
attachment, mother's and HP's  expectations of frequency of feeding etc
have even been considered.

Many many times mothers have called me saying their HPs have told them they
can't be eating/drinking enough, and this is why their babies are not
gaining enough/not sleeping  through the night/fussing and fighting/feeding
''too often" ...you name it.  They've told them this without  asking any of
the other questions about how/when the baby is feeding. <Sigh>.

I often speak to HPs in a formal way about bf, and I have a little 'true or
false' quiz I sometimes use. One of the questions is 'it is essential for
the mother to have a balanced diet in order to produce enough milk for her
baby?'. They almost always say 'true' ....and faint with shock when I show
them some of the research on this topic. Even then some of them are really
uncomfortable with the notion that someone on a diet of supermarket bread
and chemical jam plus the occasional Mars Bar can possibly make beautiful
health-giving milk....it goes against the grain.

As ever, though, it's the individual's experience that we should look at.
Research is really valuable in guiding us, but it can never give us all the
answers - if a mother says she can't eat  lentils because they give her
baby wind,  then who am I to tell her she's wrong?  However, a mother who
manages in just a few weeks to get a whole long list of things she can't
eat (we had a post the other day where a mother had compiled an exclusion
list as long as her arm in just three months) needs proper help to do a
systematic exclusion programme, for her sake as well as her baby's.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc Newcastle upon Tyne UK