><<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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