I recently wrote about the foods that you should and should not bring a breastfeeding mother, and I may have been wrong! Certainly we’ve all heard that babies will get gassy and fussy based on mom’s diet, but according to excellent resource kellymom.com, that isn’t the case! I trust kellymom to inform me correctly on breastfeeding information based on scientific fact, and this is what that site has to say:

“Breastmilk is made from what passes into mom’s blood, not what is in her stomach or digestive track.”

This blows my mind! Basically the article says that it does not matter what you eat – – with a few exceptions. Of course some babies will have intolerances (allergies) to certain foods, most often cow’s milk. Also, flavors from your food can affect your milk, flavoring it in a way that the baby could find unpalatable and cause him not to eat it…but that is not the issue at hand. After handling a fussy baby for about 24 hours, I started to look up how long whatever offending food I’d eaten would affect this little guy…and found out that it wasn’t to be blamed on my milk or my diet at all! The article goes on to explain (and Josh brought this up as well) that if spicy or gassy foods affected babies negatively, countries like Mexico or India would be full of fussy babies! 

Full article here.

Another case of the human body being amazing.

Your body can make healthy milk almost without your trying to eat well. Read this interesting article. Basically, whatever the baby needs (and your body will sense this–amazing, I know) will be leached from your body, whether you are eating it or not. This is why prenatal vitamins are recommended for nursing moms, and of course having a good diet is beneficial, but not necessary for breastfeeding.