When our child was born (a month ago) she was given formula at the clinic under the pediatrician’s advice. Soon after we went home I began to try to breastfeed her, but since she was already taking formula I combined both while planning to finally get her off the formula soon after. Because I misread the label I fed her formula that had been in the fridge for four days, two days past the time adviced by the manufacturer and she got diarrhea.
I grabbed the chance to wean her out of formula, and since I was already producing more milk than she was drinking daily it was relatively easy. After a few days the diahrrea was gone but her stools remain watery and she still has a lot of gas. The pediatrician blames this on my being lactose intolerant and passing the excess lactose to her. She told me to refrain from ingesting any kind of dairy products.
Is there any truth to this? How can my diet affect her? Did anybody else have a similar experience?
Not really. Lactose intolerance is by definition, a lack of the lactase enzyme in the brush border of the small intestine. This enzyme is responsible for splitting lactose into monosaccharides which can be absorbed across the gut lining.
Lactose by itself is not absorbed by anyone, thus it doesn’t enter the blood, thus dietary lactose is not excreted in breast milk. In the lactose intolerant, it stays in the gut lumen instead of being absorbed and there is fuel for the gas-producing bacteria in the gut lumen, who happily eat it up and produce gas. It can also act as an osmotic agent in the gut lumen, and cause diarrhea.
Now there are issues with milk allergies in the mother and in the baby, but these don’t usually cause diarrhea in the infant but I suppose it is possible. IANAD (yet) but it sounds like your infant has some sort of gastroenteritis, which has a course of around a week, sometimes with persistent diarrhea for a little longer. In some very severe cases of gastroenteritis, the baby sloughs off enough gut lining that he becomes temporarily lactose intolerant, but this is not that common. Sometimes pediatricians will recommend soy formula holidays for this reason, though.
Got any live culture plain (or vanilla) yogurt in the house? If not, get some.
Then, using that itty-bitty baby feeding spoon, dip the tip in the yogurt, and put it on the baby’s lip, where she will lick it, or on the tip of her tongue (it only takes a tiny bit). Do that about three times a day for two or three days, and the bad bacteria that have set up housekeeping in her intestines will be crowded out by the good ones from the yogurt, and she’ll be All Better. I’ve seen results faster than 2-3 days, but it’s better to be sure.
If you take her to the pediatrician, and s/he gives the baby antibiotics, you’ll still need to give her yogurt afterwards, or you’re running a real risk of a colicky baby. The yogurt is a magic cure for colic. Honest. I’ve seen it work too many times.
Breastfed babies often have watery stools, especially in the beginning. The best description I’ve heard is that it looks like mustard. Some babies have stools that look like brown mustard out of a jar, some have stools that look like cheap hot-dog-stand mustard out of a squeeze bottle. Anything in that range is normal. Gas (escaping from either end) is normal, too, in both breastfed and formula-fed newborns, as long as the baby doesn’t seem to be in pain from it more than once in a while.
Babies can get too much lactose, but this has nothing to do with the mother’s diet. As edwino says, lactose doesn’t get into the blood stream, so you can’t pass the lactose you are eating on in your milk. However, breastmilk itself contains a lot of lactose, particularly the watery foremilk. If a baby gets too much of this lactose, she’ll pass GREEN! stools - you won’t wonder “Does this look green?”, you will know - and they will smell sour. The solution is to let the baby take a full feed from one breast, rather than switching breasts mid-feed. This way she’ll get more of the hindmilk and less lactose overall. (One of my sons had this problem. If your baby has it, be proud! - you’re producing milk like a prize-winning Jersey cow! )
Newborns are very, very rarely lactose intolerant. Even if lactose intolerance runs in the family.
Good luck sorting this out, and enjoy Mighty_Babe!
Sorry, must disagree with this. Colic is not a lack of the proper intestinal flora.
Perhaps DSeid, our board pediatrician will pop by and comment further. I used to have patients with colic, but not since my practice change over three years ago!
When I was nursing Dweezil, he had pretty severe colic for the first 3 months. The ped suggested I try to avoid dairy (and a number of other foods, like tomatoes). There sometimes seemed to be a correlation between my milk intake and the colic.
I think it was more of a problem with protein than lactose though. And a friend whose daughter had severe food allergies (including cow’s milk) had to completely eliminate dairy from her own diet, or risk major, major misery on the part of the baby. I believe that baby’s misery was of the bowel variety.
Anyway - if the loose stools are truly looser than average (IIRC, Dweezil and Moon Unit’s were the consistency of, say, melted ice cream) then you might consider eliminating dairy from your diet for a few days to see if there’s an effect. Gas can be helped with Mylicon (anti-gas drops), and with “mechanical” steps (burping, gently bicycling baby’s legs, holding baby in the “colic” hold, basically torso draped tummy-down along your forearm with head in your hand).
Oh, and (speaking from a friend’s experience), you might want to avoid using mustard on your sandwiches for a bit. Or at least, never attempt to clean up sandwich drippage from your hands with anything other than napkins or soap+water :eek:
My advice? Find another pediatrician, 'cause this one’s an eejit. :rolleyes: As already pointed out, lactose doesn’t end up in your bloodstream and thus in your breast milk.
I myself have been lactose-intolerant for 30 years, breast-fed three babies perfectly successfully, with none of them having colic, or even weird-looking green stools. And this was before they had Lact-Aid, so I did it while cheating right and left on my supposedly non-dairy diet, because it drove me nuts not to eat small amounts of cheese and sherbet once in a while. So I just put up with the diarrhea and gas, and I never noticed that any of my babies had diarrhea at the same time I did. They were all remarkably non-colicky babies.