I am not familiar with the researcher or the article. If she is a professor
at Purdue she should be able to do good research, though mass media reports
such as the one you have read may not always do a good job of reporting the
findings correctly.

The diet you describe is the most common type of diet in the world. It is
certainly unlikely to lead to dramatic drowsiness or anything else harmful
to breastfeeding. Women eating diets in which the vast majority of energy
comes from cereals and grains breast feed just fine, with equal quantity
but longer duration that women with "better" diets in industrialized
countries. Of course eating more vegetables and fruits will improve most
diets in both developed and developing countries.

The only nutrient deficiency I know of that can result in such low levels
in breast milk that the infant will suffer a deficiency is thiamin (causing
beri-beri). But the diet associated with this--almost exclusively composed
of polished rice--is no longer common anywhere in the world as far as I
know. There are several nutrients that can be low in breast milk if the
mother's diet is poor and this can lead to low stores in the infant. Again,
I doubt this occurs often in industrialized countries except perhaps
occasionally in women with unusual (perhaps certain food faddist) diets,
anorexia nervosa, alcoholics, perhaps certain disease states.

On the other hand, putting a lot of pressure on a woman to eat well, stop
smoking, etc., may push her in the direction of choosing not to breast feed
at all or to combine it with bottle feeding "for safety's sake". Despite
what one says about how good all mother's milk is for their babies, some
mothers seem to have such a poor self-image (often culturally imposed) that
they believe, "well, this may be true for other women, but MY diet is so
poor that my milk couldn't be much good."

Ted Greiner, PhD
Senior Lecturer in International Nutrition
Unit for International Child Health, Entrance 11
Uppsala University
751 85 Uppsala
Sweden

phone +46 - 18 515198
fax   +46 - 18 515380

home phone +46 - 8 191397 (can be used as fax also)