Homebrew for New Born

Congratulations on the new addition! We just had our first, a boy, on March 30th. The doctor told us it is actually healthy to have a beer every now and then, even if one every day while nursing. She basically made it a point to say that beer is all natural and carries healthy nutrients, antioxidants and such which can help provoke easier breastfeeding. Also, it could help put the wee one to sleep.....but if the mother can feel the effect of the alcohol then the little one will too so just be careful on how much is consumed.

 

milk stout

 

Congrats- We also welcomed our new addition about 9 months ago. I made my wife her favorite beer, in a lower alcohol version that actually turned out better than the full strength version, go figure. All the advice we received is, one beer (low alcohol) is fine, anymore than that and you risk it passing through the milk to the baby. So every evening she and I would have a beer. I cannot say if he helped with the milk production but it sure made her more relaxed and helped her to rest easier.

 

If I had a little monster chewing on my nipples, I'd want a beer too!

 

Congrats!

I've actually done some research on this which I'll be glad to share. It used to be common during the early part of the 20th century, and probably before, for doctors to recommend a pint of stout per day to pregnant and nursing women. My grandmother remembered her doctor recommending this. I think it was understood that beer, especially stouts, had calcium and other minerals that were needed by pregnant and nursing women, and accepted that a pint would have a calming influence that was also beneficial. In fact, as recently as WWII, beer (in moderation of course) was generally thought to be beneficial and healthy: you can find WWII-era posters advertising "Guiness for strength!" and so on. More recently, research has substantiated many health benefits of moderate consumption of alcohol, with beer having more benefits that other alcoholic drinks because of the minerals content and relatively high ratio of water to alcohol. But we live in a culture (assuming you're in the U.S., like me?) where for a variety of reasons alcohol is generally considered unhealthy and destructive, if not immoral, so doctors are usually not eager to discuss the benefits of beer in moderate consumption, which include lowered risk of heart attack, stroke, and dementia. (The key being moderation: ie, 1 pint per day for women, 1-2 pints per day for men, assuming a "normal" alcohol content of ~5%. Higher alcohol beers should be consumed in less quantity.)

Long story short: one pint of stout per day will probably help your wife restore some of the minerals she needs during lactation, and will likely have other benefits including some relief of stress. Some doctors would surely recommend getting these benefits in some other way, but others would think it reasonable and healthy to have one pint. (More than one pint would probably be detrimental.) So I say, have one for me!

 

Unfortunately, non-alcoholic beer is best.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11065057

Beer does contain polysaccharide from the barley which promotes lactation, but the alcohol present causes the baby to drink less which causes a net decrease in lactation.

 

And here is why I always look to info from across the pond:

http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/958.aspx?CategoryID=54&SubCategoryID=135 "However, research shows that occasional drinking, such as one or two units once or twice a week, is not harmful to your baby while you are breastfeeding."

 

Um, you needed to look "across the pond" for a study that says essentially the same thing that the NIH study says? The OP didn't ask what "is not harmful," he asked if beer was helpful. The answer is "no."

 

Yup, but its about how results are presented. In North America we have gone too far towards the "never" aspect for risk avoidance, even when there is little proof it is worthwhile.

 

It should be noted that alcohol will only be present in the mother's milk if breast feeding occurs while alcohol is in her bloodstream. If we're talking about the moderate consumption of one pint, an average woman would metabolize the alcohol in 90 minutes, conseratively speaking, probably closer to 60 minutes in actuality. So it would be unwise to drink that pint immediately before breastfeeding, and certainly inadvisable to drink to excess so that alcohol would be in her bloodstream for several hours. But consuming the beer before bedtime or at another point in the day when it is anticipated breast feeding will not take place for at least 60-90 minutes would be perfectly sensible, and potentially beneficial, I would say.

 

Yes, that's why harmful chemicals like BPA and Phthalates have been banned here from toys and baby bottles for years, while in Europe they continue to be sold. Oh, wait, no, maybe I have that backwards....

 

According to the link kjyost posted, "Alcohol clears from the mother's blood at a rate of about one unit every two hours.
One unit is roughly equivalent to half a pint of regular beer, a 25ml (pub) measure of spirit, or a small (125ml) glass of wine."

 

I came into this thread thinking you were trading homebrew for your new born.

 

yeast in homebrew is one of the most complete sources of vitamin B there is, so drinking a yeasty beer is actually quite healthy (in moderation)

 

OK, for safety's sake, let's assume the article is correct, I understimated the time, and let's say that nursing mothers should wait 120 minutes after consuming one pint before engaging in breast feeding.

 

i'm going to throw my recent experience in since i just had a newborn as well. i actually asked our doctor about this commonly heard bit about beer, especially dark beer, being good for breastfeeding mothers.
the doctor said that if we lived 100 years ago that might be the case, but we have prenatal vitamins now so there isn't any need...she did say that a single beer would pose no problem to the baby, she explained that the real problem was that the alcohol would slow milk production and make feeding more difficult. i haven't looked up the article she quoted but its good enough for me...
if you going for vitamins/minerals just use a prenatal vitamin.

 

This is typical of modern medicine: "don't rely upon the complex natural food source people have relied upon for centuries, get the nutrients from a pill." Those wonderful pills, they tell us, have all the advantages of food without the calories and other negatives. This may be so, but there are at least two points to consider: first, it's often unclear how well the body actually metabolizes and uses supplements as opposed to food sources, because nutrients often require the presence of other substances present in the food in order to be digested efficiently. So taking a C vitamin isn't the same thing as eating an orange. Second, beer may contribute to the contentment of the mother, which may have all sorts of benefits you're not going to get from a pill. If she enjoys having her pint a day, and it makes her happy, and it calms her, these are good things. Modern medicine doesn't always take things like that into consideration, but I believe they should.

 

there was a big study that just came out about vitamin supplements, and it showed they had no benefit, and potentially some bad side effects. For some of the reasons you point out, the form of vitamins/minerals in supplements, arent usually the easiest to absorb, and there are many other compounds within the fruit/vege/etc that are beneficial as well, and without these complimentary compounds you dont get the same benefits

 

Exactly. My thinking on this was very influenced by the food writer Michael Pollan, and I can recommend his "In Defense of Food" as an introduction to his work for anyone who's interersted. In a nutshell, Pollan argues that although we're constantly hearing that this or that nutritional supplement offers the key to good health, whether it's omega-3 or lycopene or whatever, and we're constantly buying foods supplemented with these magical ingredients and adding pill supplements, people are suffering more diet-related health problems than ever. Part of the reason, he suggests, is that science hasn't really produced much understanding of what people actually eat (since all the studies depend on unreliable self-reports) or how the many components in a given meal or diet interact. Very often, supplements aren't absorbed, because they need to be digested in concert with a number of other nutrients to have their beneficial effects. Pollan argues you're better off avoiding 'health' foods and supplements and eating a traditional diet while emphasizing modest portions and large percentages of fruits and veggies. His mantra for diet: "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." (Pollan's a homebrewer, by the way. He brought Steven Colbert a bottle of his beer last time he was on the Colbert Report.)

Anyway... I find it odd that we have to "defend" actual foods against pills and supplements. It really should be the other way around. If a nursing mother can get needed vitamins and minerals from a pint of stout, and she enjoys her pint, and she's responsible enough not to breast feed while the alcohol is in her bloodstream, then she should feel perfectly fine about doing so. The onus ought to be on the drug companies and doctors to show something significantly wrong with this and to *prove* supplements are superior before they ask people to abandon a pleasurable tradition food that provides the nutrition they need.