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Diet And Exercise Do Not Affect Breastfeeding.

OVERWEIGHT women who are breastfeeding and want to lose weight can do so safely by decreasing the amount of sweetened drinks, snack foods, sweets and desserts in their diet and walking briskly for 45 minutes per day, four days per week, a new study indicates.

This approach sheds about a pound a week. It does not affect women’s ability to breastfeed, and it’s not harmful to their infants, study chief Dr. Cheryl A. Lovelady of the department of nutrition at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro told Reuters Health.

The post-childbirth period “may be an ideal time to implement an exercise and diet program,” as many women are anxious to lose weight after the baby arrives, she and her colleagues note in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. However, the effect of dieting on maternal nutrient intake, which impacts the nutrient content of breast milk and maternal health, “must be determined.”

Lovelady’s team determined dietary changes in a group of women participating in a study looking at the effects on infants of weight loss in overweight lactating mothers.

At four weeks after delivery - once breastfeeding was established and mothers had recuperated from delivery - 35 overweight breastfeeding women were randomly assigned to reduce their energy intake by 500 calories per day and to exercise, or to maintain their usual diet for 10 weeks (the control group).

Exercise consisted of brisk walking or jogging or aerobic dancing at 65-80 per cent of maximum heart rate. Calorie reduction was achieved, in large part, by decreasing consumption of foods high in fat and simple sugars such as chips, soft drinks, sweets, high-fat meat, and food groups containing starches with fat, the investigators note.

All of the women exclusively breastfed during the study and none of the women complained of reduced milk volume or “fussy” infants, or fatigue as a result of dieting and exercising. The infants of mothers in the diet-and-exercise group grew as well as the infants of mothers in the control group, Lovelady said.

The diet and exercisers lost significantly more weight and body fat over the course of the study than the control group.

The team says the dietary changes “added up to a significant decrease in overall kilocalories consumed, without adversely affecting nutrient intake except for calcium and vitamin D.” Lactating women who diet should increase their intakes of foods high in calcium and vitamin D, Lovelady and colleagues advise.

“Lactating mothers should also continue to consume at least three eight-ounce servings of low-fat dairy products and five servings of fruits and vegetables per day,” Lovelady told Reuters Health.

Meanwhile Danish researchers report that mothers with type 1 diabetes are just as likely as other women to be able to breast-feed their babies, despite difficulties with blood sugar levels and health problems in their infants Dr. Elisabeth Mathiesen and colleagues from Copenhagen University Hospital interviewed 102 women with type 1 diabetes at five days after delivery and again at four months to investigate the frequency of long-term breast-feeding and possible factors linked to successful breast-feeding.

More than half of the children had a medical complication when they were born, such as jaundice, infection or breathing difficulties. Nonetheless, most of the women (86 per cent) initiated breast-feeding, the team reports in the medical journal Diabetes Care.

By 4 months after delivery, 54 per cent were exclusively breast-feeding, 14 percent were partly breast-feeding, and 32 per cent were not breast-feeding. These rates were similar to those for women in the general population

Many infants experienced episodes of too-low blood sugar levels, and some required intravenous glucose treatment to correct the condition. However, this was necessary in only 22 per cent of the children whose mothers breast-fed exclusively, compared with 40 per cent of the others.

Previous experience with breast-feeding and higher educational level were the only independent predictors of exclusive breast-feeding.

Summing up, the researchers conclude, “The majority of the women with type 1 diabetes initiated breast-feeding and the prevalence of breast-feeding at four months was comparable to that in the background population” despite high rates of medical complications among the infants.