NOTE: Even though I mention in this blog that I am a La Leche League (LLL) Leader, the following opinions come from me speaking as a mom, not as an LLL Leader.
It’s the first week of August! That means it’s World Breastfeeding Week! Let’s celebrate! My oldest child’s upcoming birthday in late summer will mark 19 years since I started my breastfeeding career. I have been either pregnant or breastfeeding for most of that time since, sometimes even doing both, with a few months off. That’s because I’ve had seven babies and I enjoy breastfeeding (although not so much when the baby gets to be an active squirmy, gymnastic toddler) so much that I like to breastfeed my babies beyond a year, even way beyond a year.
My youngest is turning three this month and yes, he is “still” nursing. It’s not as fun for me as it was when he was a snuggly infant but I like having it as a way to calm him and sometimes put him to sleep. Before he turned a year breastfeeding no longer worked as an automatic, guaranteed-every-time-sleep inducer so I’ve had to actually develop skills to help him get to sleep at night, without crying it out. (that’s a whole blog post in it itself). But here’s a shocking confession from a dyed in the wool, La Leche Leaguer (first a member, then Leader for over 14 years and counting): I don’t always like to breastfeed! I admit, sometimes it is downright inconvenient, (especially for the two times when I was nursing two babies at once, or tandem nursing) but the payoffs have been well worth it. For the most part, it is more convenient than having to shop for, prepare, and tote around a milk substitute for my babies. Let’s face it, it’s not really convenient to be a parent. Convenience is all relative once you have kids.
What’s even better than the convenience factor is the huge health factor. My seven children have all been healthy and I attribute that to my milk, my main superpower. I gave my babies (except for my first one when I was not as up on breastfeeding) my milk exclusively for the first six months or longer (with my first I nursed him until he was over one, but I didn’t nurse him exclusively for the first six months…I have since repented). I can’t remember the exact times I started each on solids. Then after I gave them solids I kept nursing for a long time. Out of seven children, we’ve only had one ear infection. No asthma, no allergies, no pneumonia, no RSV, no hospitalizations, almost nothing beyond the normal childhood illnesses of fevers, colds, flus, and chicken pox. Oh, except for a few weird rashes that two of my children have had in response to bug bites. I say almost nothing because my oldest daughter has had chronic stomach aches that we are still figuring out. These pictures show some of my kids and their cousins, all breastfed as babies, at our recent extended family vacation in Park City, Utah. We went swimming and did a ton more fun activities. (More on all that later! We have been having a blast!)
I’ve been a breastfeeding support counselor (La Leche League Leader) for over 14 years now. I have answered a lot of women’s questions about breastfeeding as I have led La Leche League meetings and answered phone calls. It’s been fun and interesting to hear the variety of questions. Most of them deal with nipple confusion and low milk supply. Probably the oddest question was when a woman asked if eating a lot of bananas would do something to her milk supply. I told her, after referring to my breastfeeding books, that that was something nobody has studied yet and she would have to go with her gut feeling.
The good food you eat does make your milk better, and that’s something everybody is still learning about, even in La Leche League, the breastfeeding authority. We know that bad things can go through our breast milk, like marijuana and environmental toxins, so it makes sense that good things do too. We don’t fully appreciate the power we women have to confer robust health to our children through the power of the milk that comes from our breastfeeding trees of life. (The breast ducts have a tree-like structure, you can read more about that and all the connections that moms and women and breastfeeding have with trees in my book at the tab that says “the book” above.) We don’t yet fully appreciate how these trees of life create milk that is affected by what we eat, and that the placental tree of life is affected by what we eat as well when we are pregnant.
In all my years of breastfeeding and giving breastfeeding support, I have never encountered what I learned in the following article which one of my favorite bloggers, Sarah Pope, the Healthy Home Economist, referred to in her recent blog about relieving baby constipation naturally. In that blog post Sarah referenced an article from the Weston A. Price Foundation found here about successful breastfeeding. In her blog post Sarah addresses several issues, first what to do if your baby is constipated and bottlefeeding, and then what to do if your baby is constipated and breastfeeding. After the latter topic she delves into how the mom’s diet can cause constipation in a baby if the mom is breastfeeding.
In my career as an LLL Leader, I have had very few questions about baby constipation, and even fewer questions about maternal diet and the connection to baby’s bowels. Like zero. Thank goodness, as my La Leche League books do not have all the answers, beyond eliminating dairy if a baby gets fussy. It seems that very few people know about the connection. I do remember a mom asking me a question about if it was cause for alarm that her exclusively baby had not a bowel movement in over a week. I also remember talking to a fellow La Leche League Leader who had the same question. I have heard in my naturally healthy circles that exclusively breastfed babies fill their diaper every time they eat but real life experience has not shown that to be true.
Here’s what I learned from Sarah’s blog post and the article she referenced:
- breastfed babies should eliminate at least every other day
- if your baby is on artificial baby milk and gets constipated then the constipation probably comes from the bad quality of processed ingredients in the artificial baby milk. I have always admired Sarah’s chutzpah in being willing to call things bad when they are bad. This woman does not play pussyfoot with her words. She says you can make baby milk from wholesome ingredients, from the farm, (like raw cow’s or goat’s milk) at home. Giving your baby whole ingredients instead of processed ingredients will make a world of difference for your baby’s health. (My note: breastfeeding is the normal way to feed your baby. Please go to http://llli.org to get help to breastfeed your baby. It is extremely rare for a mom to be physically unable to breastfeed once she has the proper support and education on how to breastfeed.)
- if your baby is exclusively breastfed and gets constipated then the culprit is your diet as a mom
- Sarah suggests eliminating pasteurized dairy, any processed food, and unsoaked grains from your diet, especially processed wheat
- some studies have shown disturbing results about mother’s milk
- LCPUFAs, or long-chain polyunsaturated fats, are very important for the normal and especially robust health of babies. Here’s what the WAPF article states (LCPs means the same as LCPUFAs). You will have to go to the original article to get the footnotes:
What is less well known is that the levels of LCPs in human breast milk greatly depend on the mother’s diet. An important 1997 study compared the fatty acid composition of breast milk of mothers in two Chinese provinces with that of Canadian mothers.11 Mothers in the traditional province of Chongqing had higher levels of milk fat than those from westernized Hong Kong, and higher levels of AA, due to a special period of feeding for the first four weeks after the birth of the baby during which Chongqing mothers consume up to ten eggs per day and large amounts of chicken and pork. The diet of Hong Kong mothers was much lower in fat and calories, but because of high fish consumption, their levels of DHA were as high as those of Chongqing mothers. But breast milk levels of AA and DHA in both provinces were much higher than those of Canadian mothers.
The Chinese breast milk study proves that the levels of important fatty acids in mother’s milk are strongly influenced by the mother’s diet. For example, the content of erucic acid (a long-chain monounsaturated fatty acid) increased in the milk of Chongqing mothers during the later weeks of lactation, reflecting a dietary switch from animal fats to rape seed oil. Levels of omega-6 linoleic acid were high in the milk of Hong Kong mothers, reflecting their use of high-omega-6 vegetable oils derived from corn and soy.
Ideal breast milk contains high levels of both saturated fats and LCPs. This can be accomplished by consuming high levels of animal fats plus eggs, cod liver oil and oily fish throughout the lactation period. Saturated fats in mother’s milk stimulate the immune system and work synergistically with LCPs to maintain them in the tissues where they belong.12 Levels of fat in a mother’s milk will decrease with each baby unless she takes special care to consume high levels of nutrient-dense fats between pregnancies and during each lactation.13
Hmmm, wow. That is stuff nobody in La Leche League ever told me! Dr. Sears, the attachment parenting guru who got turned on to nutrition after he nearly died of colon cancer in 1997 or so, was right when he emphasized the importance of LCPUFAs (he calls them “Elsie Poofas). He gave a nutrition lecture about them at an LLLI conference I attended years ago, in 1999, at Walt Disney World. (Nostalgia note: I still have my notes in the cute Mickey Mouse notebook that I bought at the gift shop right before his lecture.) LCPUFA stands for long chain polyunstatured fatty acids. The way he praised them you would have thought that LCPUFAs were so fantastic that they could reverse heart disease, stop aging, do your dishes, make you an Olympian, and prevent all sickness . One of the LCPUFAs he talked about the most was DHA, which he said was vital for building your baby’s brain and nerves and eyes. It does increase your baby’s IQ and reduce ADHD. He pointed out that DHA is in mother’s milk and therefore could be passed on to the baby. But then he cited a study done of moms in China and the U.S. to determine the amount of DHA in the mother’s milk. The Chinese mothers had more DHA in their milk than the American mothers. He then said it would be good for moms to eat foods high in DHA, like flax oil, or wild fish, but he didn’t go into amounts. I remember thinking as I left the presentation, well, should I be taking a DHA supplement? I was vegan at the time so not into fish and I already knew that flax oil was yucky-tasting so I would not even be attempting to gag it down. I had been grinding flax seed off and on for flaxmeal to put on my oatmeal but since that doesn’t taste delicious I dropped the habit.
Even later in the LLLI world, with these studies coming out about DHA that Dr. Sears mentioned and the one in the WAPF article that I just indicated LLLI would not come out and recommend that breastfeeding moms eat certain foods high in DHA. I can understand that LLLI is in a tricky place. The organization does not want to say women have to eat certain foods to make good milk, because they don’t want a nursing mother to give up breastfeeding if she has a less than ideal diet. The last thing it, the organization wants to hear, is “(Sigh), I guess I can’t breastfeed since I am not eating whole organic food, cage-free eggs, and organ meat and grass-fed cows.”
It also doesn’t want a mom to say, as one mom at an LLL meeting so jokingly and memorably said, “I am going to give you (the baby) formula so I can eat crappy!” (I immediately pictured a mom chowing down on Twinkies and Ding Dongs while she shoved a bottle of artificial baby milk in the baby’s mouth.)
Here is one statement from LLLI about DHA. I am disappointed that it doesn’t recommend moms take specific foods high in DHA. It simply repeats the LLL concept that moms eat a variety of foods in as close to their natural state as possible.
The WAPF article about studies that show mother’s milk are lacking in certain nutrients makes me wonder. Could those results come from women who are eating “crappy”? Is mother’s milk always the best, even when the mother’s diet isn’t the best?
I have mixed opinons about the WAPF article. The article concludes with common “deceptions” about breastfeeding. First it says that it is a deception that insufficient milk supply is rare. I haven’t done a scientific study on the topic, but I have a gut feeling that if women have the right education on how to make milk, it is rare to have insufficient milk supply. I have also recently learned though that yeast infections can cause low milk supply, and yeast infections are probably a lot more prevalent among women than we realize. Next the article says it is a deception that all mothers produce good milk. Here is what it says:
Second is the deception that “Almost all mothers can produce good milk, even if their diet is not perfect.” With this statement we turn our backs on the accumulated wisdom of traditional people throughout the globe, most of whom recognized that nursing mothers need special diets to meet the special needs of the growing infant. As early as the 1940s, Weston Price observed a decline in the quality of human breast milk, as evidenced by the extensive dental problems he found in his breastfed patients.34 The recent poor showing of breastfed infants in comparison trials indicates that modern human milk is not better—and possibly worse—than it was in Price’s day.
My heart wants to say that most moms can produce enough milk and enough good milk. I have a hard time believing everything in the WAPF article. I think that mother’s milk, even if the mother’s not eating an ideal WAPF diet, is still far superior to artificial baby milk. I like that someone wrote a rebuttal to the WAPF article found here.
My heart says to all moms everywhere, do what you can to breasfeed. Ask questions, talk to other successful nursing moms, and get your questions answered by these successful nursing moms (hint…you can find them at an LLL meeting), not your husband or mother-in-law who never got past her sore nipples, so that you know how to breastfeed. Don’t talk to your doctor about how to breastfeed, because he probably only had an hour lecture on the why of breastfeeding in medical school and doesn’t know how to do it, unless he’s like Dr. Sears and married to a woman who has successfully breastfed. (Btw, did you know that his wife, Martha, is an LLLI Leader, as well as at least one of his daughters-in-law?)
Please know that your milk is a byproduct of your diet and you have the power to create gloriously healthy kids. Starting with your milk (actually when you are pregnant) and then with the food that you give them from your kitchen, you have the power to raise kids who are healthy and powerful as Superman with near x-ray vision who hardly ever get sick, IF you eat special sacred, high-fat, nutrient dense food that all pregnant and lactating woman need, like it said above, which are saturated fats from animal foods: eggs, meat, and organ meats and foods with LCPUFAs, like fish, and cod liver oil.
HERE is the diet that the WAPF recommends for pregnant and nursing moms. I know you may think raw milk and organ meat are gross, as I did emerging from my vegan years. I was talking about this with my friend Anji and she said that yes, liver from the grocery store is gross, but if you get if from a grass fed cow and cook it right it is actually delicious. I mentioned that to my sister here on my vacation and she said that she had heard about a place in New York City that specializes in serving superb tasting fried liver that is to die for. Hey, maybe the recipe is similar to the one for liver in the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, based on the WAPF teachings.
Tree of Life Mothering 