Dear Gayle,
I have worked with several Moms whose babies' primary complaint was
incredible constipation. Most of them were allergy related. In the case of
one of them the Mother could not have anything that contained dairy in her
diet. She began cooking more things from scratch and became a committed label
reader. Once she had eliminated dairy from her diet COMPLETELY, the
constipation disappeared...despite the ped's skepticism that the two were
related.
Since a typical Chinese diet probably contains little or no dairy, that is
probably not the offending allergen. (What formula was she occasionally
supplemented with?) Both my children have food allergies, as do I (the apples
do not fall far from the tree!), and when going through the initial allergy
evaluation, we had to fill out a questionnaire which asked for us to fill out
columns with titles such as
"What foods you eat every day", "What foods you eat once or twice a week" ,
"What foods you eat only occasionally".
From the list of foods eaten every day came the list of possible offending
foods and the allergist used this as the basis of an elimination diet.
I would imagine it is something in this Mom's diet that she is eating every
day that is causing this reaction in the baby.
I would suggest that she make a list of the things she eats every day,
eliminates them from her diet for at least three weeks and then evaluates
whether or not that has improved the constipation in the baby. Usually Moms
see a rather dramatic result w/in 48-72 hours.
After that she should be encouraged to do a challenge, by reintroducing only
one food at one time on one day. If after the challenge there is no sign of
the constipation, she can rotate the offending foods so that she is not
eating them more than every 4-5 days.
Also, has anyone in the mother's or father's diet ever had any symptoms of
food or other allergies? (This increases the likelihood of the baby having
allergies.)
{Interesting side note: I (and my two children) are allergic to wheat. So we
took advantage of the many non-wheat, non-gluten foods now available in many
health food stores. In many cases, the substitute was rice flour. I found I
became allergic to rice then after an extended time of using rice flour, rice
milk (for the daughter who was also allergic to dairy), rice cakes, etc. For
some people, reduction and rotation of the offending allergens is very
important.}
La Leche League International has a wonderful pamphlet, Allergies (#925-17,
$.95) that goes into much more detail.
Ann Russell, LLLL IBCLC

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