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Date: | Mon, 4 Jun 2007 09:08:33 +0100 |
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><<My understanding is that maternal nutrition is of marginal impact
>>only on milk quality - and there are a number of studies that show
>>this.>>
>
>quantity. maternal nutrition doesn't significantly affect quantity.
>I'd always heard on this list and at LLL that maternal nutrition
>didn't affect quality but when I started slogging through the studies
>a few years ago, I found that not to be true. There were significant
>differences in important nutrients. I'm sure I pulled the studies
>off pubmed, they should be easy to find.
>
>Katherine
I too did a collection of studies, mainly because I was meeting this
question a lot when training healthcare professionals whose first
response to any concern about bf was to suggest to the mother she
wasn't eating 'properly'.
My collection of studies showed that the impact of diet on the
quality of breastmilk was very small.
This is not to say that 'breastmilk is all the same', as clearly it
isn't, and it does indeed differ from mother to mother and from day
to day within the same mother, not to mention from culture to culture.
But the quality remains sufficient to fully nourish an infant.
You may well be right that there are 'significant differences in
important nutrients' - that really doesn't matter a bit. My diet and
that of an Indian or a Chinese or an Inuit may show 'significant
differences in important nutrients' but we all eat well. You have to
demonstrate that these 'significant differences' in breastmilk impact
on the ability of breastmilk to nourish a baby - and I have never
seen any studies which show this (apart from studies done on a
chronically undernourished population, and even then, there is room
for discussion).
The risk, of course, in overplaying the effect of diet on the quality
of breastmilk is that mothers (and healthcare professionals) think
of breastfeeding as something that requires a specially 'good' diet.
If breastfeeding seems inadequate, then the mother is encouraged to
'eat well' and simple, direct 'fixes' like feeding the baby more
often, or checking on milk transfer, get overlooked.
I am all for women eating well. I think many Western diets are too
high in calories and too low in nutrition. But I know of no studies
that show a breastfeeding woman eating one of these diets will have
an infant who is poorly or even less than adequately nourished as a
result.
But if these comparisons exist, let me know about them!
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK
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