Dietary taboos for breastfeeding mothers

One is any food or drink containing alcohol, and the other is food that you are clearly allergic to, or that you are sure will cause an allergic reaction in your baby after eating it. All the other things you've heard about "Don't touch breast-feeding foods", "Avoid cold foods" and "Don't eat even one bite of spicy foods" are all different from person to person and there is no unified standard.

Let’s talk about the most common alcohol misunderstanding first. Don’t talk about “cooked rice wine and glutinous rice wine, the alcohol has evaporated, and the milk production effect is good.” The mother-in-law of the mother-in-law in the same ward gave me two bowls of fermented glutinous rice eggs on the third day after giving birth. As a result, the baby slept for almost 12 hours and could not wake up. She was sent to the pediatrician for a check-up. There was a trace amount of alcohol in the blood. Fortunately, the intake was not too much and nothing serious happened. At present, the WHO, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Chinese Maternal and Child Health Association have clearly pointed out that there is no safe threshold for alcohol intake during breastfeeding. Alcohol will enter the baby's body through breast milk and affect the development of the nervous system. Even a small amount may cause drowsiness and feeding difficulties in the baby. Long-term intake will also affect gross motor and cognitive development. There is really no need to gamble with the baby's health on the so-called "breastfeeding effect."

Except for these two categories that must not be touched, the remaining so-called taboos are basically "A is like honey and B is like arsenic". For example, I read someone saying that you shouldn’t even drink milk tea during breastfeeding. I laughed at the time. My best friend breastfed exclusively until she was one and a half years old, and ordered a glass of iced Americano every afternoon. Her baby is now in kindergarten, and her reaction time is half a beat faster than that of other children of the same age. All indicators in her physical examination are excellent. Of course, I don’t want you to drink coffee. The currently recognized safe dose is no more than 200mg of caffeine per day, which is about the amount of one medium cup of regular American milk tea, or two 200ml cups of milk tea. As long as your baby doesn’t become abnormally irritable, have difficulty falling asleep, or cry frequently after drinking it, you can drink it normally. You really don’t have to look at the milk tea shop to swallow your saliva.

As for the "list of foods to restore breast milk" that has been rumored to be magical, it is actually quite controversial. There is no such thing as "restoring milk" in the Western medicine system, and there is no evidence-based basis to prove that foods such as leeks, malt, and hawthorn can directly inhibit the secretion of prolactin. A while ago, I heard from a mother in the same community that she was so greedy that she ate two kilograms of fried leeks, and her milk was so swollen that night that she had to get up to suck it. However, from the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, it is true that some pungent and astringent foods may have an impact on mothers who are deficient in qi and blood and have insufficient lactation. Therefore, they cannot be dismissed as rumors. If you have eaten a certain food before and feel that your milk production has dropped significantly, just avoid it and don't listen to what others say.

There is also the most common refrain from elders: "You can't eat cold food or spicy food", which is even less universal. My husband's hometown is in Chongqing, and mothers there eat spicy dishes with ginger to whet their appetites during confinement. My distant sister-in-law took ice powder for half a month after giving birth, and the baby never had diarrhea or eczema. It is even more unreasonable to say that eating cold food will cause diarrhea in the baby. The food has already been heated to 37 degrees when it enters your stomach. Is it possible that it can carry ice particles into the breast? As long as your stomach can tolerate it, you don't have stomachache or diarrhea after eating it cold, and your baby doesn't have any abnormal reactions after eating it, you can eat what you should.

I exclusively breastfed myself for 14 months. I didn’t touch anything except wine. I ate hot pot, milk tea, iced watermelon, and crayfish whenever I wanted. My baby never had any problems because of what I ate, and my milk supply was always enough. On the contrary, I have seen many mothers who dare not eat or touch anything. They drink bland soup every day until they vomit, their mood is so bad that they shed tears, and the amount of milk becomes less and less.

To put it bluntly, dietary taboos during lactation have never been shackles for mothers. The core principle is "don't hurt yourself, don't hurt the baby." There is no need to check the list one by one on the Internet, and there is no need to listen to the ramblings of the seven aunts and eight aunts. It is more reliable than anything else to observe the reactions of yourself and the baby. After all, being a mother is tiring enough. Being able to eat something you like and make yourself happy is more useful than any soup.