Alcohol and Breastfeeding
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Alcohol and Breastfeeding
Is there a rule of thumb about how long a nursing mother should wait
after drinking an alcoholic beverage before she nurses her child?
The advice I was given by an IBCLC is that your milk will have the same
alcohol content as they would find in your blood if they were to test you.
So if you wait as long as you would to be legally allowed to drive a car...
that is a safe amount of time.
Like another reader who cited IBCLC as a source, I have been told
that the alcohol in your child's blood reaches the same level as in
yours. The other thing that my pediatrician told me was that the
alcohol stays in the child's blood for twice as long. Also, in a
much smaller individual who is in the throes of early development
(brain cells connecting to eachother, etc), the effect of that
alcohol blood level may have very different effects and consequences
than it does in a grown adult. Ask yourself this: would you mind if
your infant consumed alcohol, even a little bit? If the answer is
no, you wouldn't mind, then think about how much alcohol you'd like
your infant to drink, and time nursing accordingly. If the answer is
yes, you would mind even if it was just a little bit, then just stop
drinking until you're ready to discontinue nursing. Unless you have
a problem with alcohol, that shouldn't be too much trouble.
The advice that I have received regarding this is that very little of
the alcohol shows up in the milk (like less than one-tenth of a percent),
and that a glass or two of wine is not a problem at all. I recently was
hanging out with three doctor friends, all moms of babies under a year and
they concurred that a drink or two every few hours would not negatively
affect the baby. In fact, one of them cited her brother (a pediatric
gastroenterologist) who said that even less gets in the milk if the mom
nurses first before having a drink. Maybe there are other sources
before jumping on the pregnancy/nursing diet police bandwagon?
this page was last updated: Oct 26, 2006
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