Myth: Food from the mum doesn’t get into her breast milk

Common sense will tell you that it does

 

Video transcript:

This video is about the myth of what a mom eats going through her breast milk to the baby or the myth being that it doesn’t go through to the baby. I can tell you now what you eat affects your breast milk and goes through the baby. There is loads of research on this. I’ve looked it up, I found it, I’ve got it. 

 

Now, it’s almost not an exact science because your breast milk was clever. Some things are really, some things that you eat really go through to the milk. Other things, not so much but what I can say is the breast milk keeps it very nicely within certain parameters so that baby gets the correct amount of nutrients. 

 

So, I’ve heard people say to me that women in third world countries have breastfed and they’re malnourished and it’s fine, okay. Where is the milk coming from? What is making the milk? You are making the milk. The breast milk is made from you and you are supplied by your food, okay. So, if that food’s not there, amazing, the breast milk will make itself from you. You will then feel rubbish and tired and deficient. So, even if I’m completely wrong, doesn’t it make sense for you to eat well, be nourished, have energy? I mean, you’re tired. You just grown a baby and your placenta, and delivered a baby and your placenta and now you’re looking after a baby and you’re really tired and lacking sleep. Doesn’t it make sense to look after yourself with good nutrition so you feel good? Your breast milk is good even if your breast milk is just taking that from you, you’ll then supply new to supply your breast milk, okay. 

 

So, I always talk about food with a mom for them and to nourish their breast milk so their breast milk nourishes their baby and the baby feels full. When the baby’s full, they’re less likely to cry so you get a happy baby. On top of that, I’ve just seen it masses of times, moms come in and they’re like “…my breast milk wasn’t very good on the day that I’d hardly drunk anything or I didn’t eat and then it was better when I ate well and I slept well. The color changes and it smells different…” all this kind of stuff and if they’re putting it in a bottle, expressing, it’s thicker or thinner on certain days. It changes and it changes for very clever reasons – adapting to you, adapting to your baby. Also, how you are, if you’re tired or stress and I go all into this in the books about the diets for the moms and the food plans which are really easy but you know it’s really, it’s, it’s easy to do and it’s making you eat much better because moms don’t eat so well. 

 

So, the myth is what you eat and drink does go through the babies. I’ve seen all, I’ve seen mom’s drinking masses of coke and fizzy drinks and that’s going through. I’ve seen dairy affect their babies but other lots of other smaller things I like to you know that you had to narrow it down. So, definitely it goes through. I have even had lactation consultants say to me “…of course, it doesn’t go through. That’s a load of rubbish. Don’t tell moms this. It doesn’t go through because breast milk is made from the mom’s blood…”, okay. 

 

True! They thought the food that you eat didn’t go into your blood which then makes the breast milk. They don’t have the whole picture, the whole physiology of how a body works and then use that to help them understand how the breast milk works, how the whole mother works to create the breast milk to feed the baby. So, this crazy thing that breast milk is made from the blood, therefore what you eat doesn’t affect the breast milk but what you eat goes into your blood.

 

That’s the whole problem. You eat it, into the stomach, digest it down, into the small intestine where the body extracts the good stuff from your food into your blood. That is the whole point of the digestive system, to get the goodness from your food into your bloodstream and from the bloodstream, it goes all around your body including to your breasts to make your breast milk, okay. So, that’s kind of the things that I hear. 

 

So, this is the myth that it doesn’t affect your breast milk. It does. So have a look at the rest of the lessons, all about how to keep yourself healthy and eat well.