Guess what? It appears that drinking while breastfeeding is okay. WHAT?! That's great news for nursing mamás who like to have a drink now and again. I mean, I'm not suggesting you get smashed and nurse your baby while you are smashed, BUT let's say you do get smashed–I'm sure you've heard the whole "pump and dump" advice, right? That means that you should pump breast milk after you drink and dump it so your kid doesn't suck up any of the alcohol you drank. Well it turns out you don't have to do that at all! Yay, for no more wasted breast milk.
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What you do need to do is wait until you sober up. Once the alcohol is out of your system, then it's out of your breast milk too.
Okay, so before I get into this any further, let me make it perfectly clear that I am not a doctor. If you are drinking and plan to nurse, this is something you should discuss with your doctor as I'm sure they get paid a lot more than I do and also know a lot more than I do on the subject. The information that I'm getting comes from recent research that "studied the consequences of alcohol intake during lactation." The findings are fascinating. Check this part of the research out:
The alcohol concentrations in breast milk closely resemble those in maternal blood. The amount of alcohol presented to nursing infants through breast milk is approximately 5–6% of the weight-adjusted maternal dose, and even in a theoretical case of binge drinking, the children would not be subjected to clinically relevant amounts of alcohol.
So basically even if you were to binge drink and nurse, your child would be getting a very small percentage of alcohol that wouldn't be considered a "clinically relevant" amount according to this study. Now keep in mind that this study wasn't about mothers with a drinking problem. So if you are abusing alcohol on a regular basis, I have a feeling that's not a good idea for you or your child.
I have to tell you that when I was nursing and I nursed for a long time, my lactation consultant told me that if I was good to drive, I was good to nurse and I believed her. You will probably be appalled to know that there was even one time at a wedding when I was nursing while I had a margarita in front of me. Yes, it raised some eyebrows and I'm sure freaked people out, but if they had paid attention, they would have seen that I wasn't just nursing my baby, I was also nursing that margarita–meaning I was drinking it very slowly and wasn't concerned about having so much alcohol in my body that it would affect my child.
I'm pretty sure most mothers don't take drinking while nursing lightly, but this new information is good to know especially during the holiday season where rompope flows freely and you might want to have a have a sip without feeling like the worst mother in the world.
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