Marianne and Renata,
I have studied nutrition for over 25 years. There is so much more that I do not know than I do know. 
But, there are some foundational things that I have distilled from all that I have read and studied to 
feel pretty confident in teaching parents (I teach a series for parents on Raising Children Holistically, 
which includes a full day in nutrition, a full day in home remedies and a full day in energy medicine) 
b/c my greatest goal with clients is to help them feel confident in raising their own children. I had to
gain that confidence through working with holistic providers, reading, taking workshops and practicing
on my family (intuition gets you a long way). I think we give mothers so much hope that they are the 
"experts" on their own babies when we support uninterrupted birth, normal attachment and feeding
at breast, and then it is gone to the medical model when they cannot even integrate the foundations
of good nutrition, minimizing toxic exposure, and caring for their own children's well-being.

So, the long answer, I guess, is that I do not understand how one can be an LC and NOT be well-
grounded in nutrition, b/c bfing is the foundation of all nutrition--or more significantly, of all nourishment. 
I think many babies are lost to artificial-feeding b/c their LCs do not know any more about nutrition 
than their (avg) peds do. For example, it is basic foundational knowledge that eczema and "baby acne"
and reflux are allergy related and all are either treated with drugs or treated as "normal" in the medical 
model! I do not know how I would personally give good care to a baby with these symptoms if I did not 
know to eliminate allergens and then (more importantly) heal the gut. 

I also do not fear that mothers will wean b/c they have to make dietary changes. Properly supported, 
I don't see that happening. I think b/c I provide a support group, can answer their questions,
can help them learn how to eat, and that they can get support anytime of day from each other via my 
clients' yahoo group, they keep going. Most of my clients who have been through this do not do the 
obligatory "dairy-elimination" until they can eat it again--they actually change their lifestyles and
raise healthier families. I really do believe we need to heal the mother to heal the baby. 

I know I have given this example before, but it was a powerful affirmation for me. I saw a mom whose
baby was on a feeding tube--would not eat by breast or bottle or syringe (had been fully on breast at birth)
--I think was 5 weeks when I met them. Other LCs had thrown up their hands in frustration. The only 
things GI docs were offering was a permanent placement of the tube. The day I saw the mom, I knew we 
had three huge problems to solve at once--food allergies, structural issues and a TT. The next day, the 
baby saw a chiro and we both drove from that appt to the ped for clipping of the TT. The next day, mom 
saw my ND referral for muscle-testing for allergies. Mom eliminated about 10 foods that day. Within three 
days of our first visit, the baby was off the tube and on the breast. All of the self-attachment and latch 
techniques in the world were not going to get this very smart baby to take food by choice that was tearing 
up her gut. It literally hurt her to eat and by forcing the milk into her, they were just doing more damage. 
Her ped thought I was crazy, but mom was desperate AND the GI she went to for a second opinion told
her I was right. Anyway, baby recovered fully. I knew the symptoms of food allergy, knew the symptoms
of gut damage in mom, knew what a posterior TT looked like and knew where to get supportive services.

I have case after case of babies who did very poorly in various ways at breast until nutrition was addressed.
I do not like to think of it as an issue of allergies--or of disease--but really an issue of healing. I also do 
not hesitate to tell moms that they have terrible diets and need to clean them up. I do think what we eat 
matters and that it is a lie we have been telling women for decades now that what they ingest matters not
to the quality of their milk. How absurd is that!! It matters first to their own well-being (think inflammation), 
hence to their fertility (depression, infertility, PCOS, hormone imbalances, chronic disease) and to the quality 
of the conception (increased midline defects for one), their ability to birth (we have very unhealthy pop of 
women of child-bearing age in the US--it isn't only the fault of the medical model that women have more 
medicalized births) and their ability to establish a normalized and nourishing milk supply. Personally, I think 
the difficulty many women have with managing night-time with babies stems from 2 causes--medicalized
birth which trashes the normal hormonal milieu that allows women to manage on interrupted sleep and 
poor nutrition. 

We could argue undernourished women have always managed to have and feed babies, but they haven't
always had to do so while their bodies were also under the toxic burden we now manage. And being underfed 
is less worrisome by far (it is actually an advantage to a point) than being overfed and undernourished. 
The mixed messages to the genetic material has got to be wreaking havoc with our immune response 
(think epigenetics) to say the very least. 

So--what do we need to know? IMO, a lot. How to learn it? It took me a long time and I am working on 
methods to teach it to others. I think that would be an off-list discussion though. But, it is not my goal 
to simply see an infant at breast. I don't want to see the family in a couple of years and find out they weaned
at 3 mos b/c baby had reflux, blah,blah, blah. We need to raise healthy children and given the rise in 
obesity and other diseases in children, we are failing badly. I'd rather parents got the impression that
it all matters and I'd like to see them have a place to get good information to make it work. But, even your 
goal is ONLY an infant at breast (which would be necessary in some situations), these skills would make that
happen for many more babies. 

Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA
Intuitive Parenting Network, LLC


 









Last week, Marianne asked me:
I always read through your postings carefully and applaud you for 
coming up with suggestions that are not so obvious. I must say... it 
makes me very nervous sometimes, to realize that there are so many 
options I wouldn't have a clue about as for whether they caused the 
problem I might see with a mom. I have a question that may not be that 
easy to answer, but I'll pose it nevertheless. What do you (and others!) 
feel should be the basic knowledge of an lc, when it comes to nutrition? 
We all have different fields of expertise, that develop over the years.
Our overall knowledge will expand when time goes by, but still we are 
not all nutritionists (or psychologists or politicians or cst's or 
whatever other discipline might be useful in addressing bf problems). 
We can recommend books to each other on parenting or low supply or 
sucking skills, but what would be a good book when we want to go a 
little deeper into how you can assess nutritional problems in mom, 
that, by solving them, will help baby heal? I look forward to your 
suggestion.

Renata followed:

"As a dietitian, I am asking myself this very question. I have started
studying more about food sensitivities (not just the traditional IgE
allergies), and next on my line of professional development will be 
PCOS. Both these conditions have come to my attention because they 
often (and unnecessarily) discourage breastfeeding.

So tell me, what are some of the nutrition questions you often come 
across? What challenges do you face? What puzzles you the most? What 
resources have helped you?

Linda:
"Nutritional challenge I face...
My biggest frustration is when I have a mom with baby that is intolerant
of foods in mom's diet and I'm working with mom to help baby feel better
and to detect all the problem foods. I'll have mom on say a meat, a 
couple veggies as well as greens & yams, a couple fruits and a whole 
grain, and a baby finally doing well, gaining weight, recovering from 
colic/reflux/diarrhea, whatever. THEN some doctor or in-law tells the 
mom that she needs more "nutrition" and especially that she can't 
possibly be healthy without consuming foreign animal milk. I don't know 
what else specifically they'd want to see in her diet --- they just say
"more foods," ususally, but this is the point where I see moms lose 
their resolve and babies going onto formula."



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