What you eat can affect your breast milk when you're nursing in ways you might not expect. It's important to eat well while nursing, but if you eat a reasonably healthy diet, you will produce healthy breast milk. If your diet is deficient in certain nutrients, you might have to take supplements to meet your baby's needs as well as your own.
Human breast milk supplies, on average, 22 calories per ounce, according to lactation consultant Kelly Bonyata. The caloric content varies during the day, ranging from 13 to 35 calories per ounce The fat content in the breast milk causes the caloric variation. Breast milk produced at the end of the feeding, called hindmilk, has a higher fat content than the milk produced at the beginning of the feeding, called foremilk. Since fat contains more calories than protein or carbohydrate, milk with a higher fat content will contain more calories.
The types of food you eat doesn't affect the total fat content of your milk but can affect the type of fats you produce. A Chinese study reported in the November-December 2009 issue of "Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes, and Essential Fatty Acids" found that mothers who lived in coastal area had higher levels of fatty acids found primarily in fish, such as docosahexaenoic acid, in their breast milk.
If you follow a vegan diet, you might not get enough B-12 from the foods you eat, since meat has the highest B-12 content. Breast-feeding women have an increased need for vitamin B-12. If you have a B-12 deficiency, your breast milk might not contain enough of this nutrient. Babies deficient in B-12 can have developmental delays and might develop anemia, irritability, decreased appetite and apathy.
Taste and Smell
The foods you eat while breast-feeding can affect the taste and smell of your breast milk. Breast-fed babies might have a more adventurous palate, willing to try different types of food, because they experience different flavors and smells in their daily meals. Formula, on the other hand, always tastes and smells the same. A Danish study published in the September 2008 issue of "Physiology and Behavior" reported that different flavors remain in breast milk for varying amounts of time, with banana peaking and disappearing within an hour while menthol remained for up to eight hours.
- KellyMom: What Affects the Amount of Fat or Calories in Mom’s Milk?
- ABC News: Breast Milk Flavor May Affect How a Child Eats
- Pediatrics: Prenatal and Postnatal Flavor Learning By Human Infants
- eMedTV: Vitamin B-12 and Breastfeeding
- Physiology and Behavior: Differential Transfer of Dietary Flavour Compounds into Human Breast Milk
- Dr. Greene: When Does the Flavor Hit Breast Milk?
- Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes, and Essential Fatty Acids: Fatty Acid Composition of Diet, Cord Blood and Breast Milk in Chinese Mothers with Different Dietary Habits
- newborn image by Valentin Mosichev from Fotolia.com