high frequency days

[Guest guest]

Dear Colleagues:

All humans have varying appetites. There are days when one wants more to eat and

days when one wants less.

Women, in the week before their period starts, often want to eat more. Toddlers

will have a day when they eat double or triple what they ordinarily do. Our

appetites vary with season, with metabolic demand.

Nursing babies do the same.

My confusion is about different research studies that say:

1) A mother's milk production stabilizes around 4 to 6 weeks postpartum

2) Baby takes in about the same amount of milk fat in 24 hours, which

regulates intake

3) Babies have random days of eating more.

So how does all that work together? We probably don't know....and never will.

Just like the blind men and the elephant couldn't put a picture together of the

whole elephant, although all their assessments were accurate ( of the parts they

could feel).

Here's the only study about feeding frequency that I could find, where mothers

kept track of every feed.

Acta Paediatr. 1999 Feb;88(2):203-11.

Breastfeeding patterns in exclusively breastfed infants: a longitudinal

prospective study in Uppsala, Sweden.

Hörnell A, Aarts C, Kylberg E, Hofvander Y, Gebre-Medhin M.

Source

Department of Women's and Children's Health, Uppsala University, Sweden.

ICH.sekretariat@...

Abstract

Exclusive breastfeeding was studied among 506 infants in Uppsala, Sweden, based

on daily recordings during the first 6 mo. The mothers had previously breastfed

at least one infant for at least 4 mo. Most of the mothers considered that they

breastfed on demand.

Wide variations in breastfeeding frequency and suckling duration were found both

between different infants and in the individual infant over time. At 2 wk, the

mean frequency of daytime feeds (based on one 13-d record) between different

infants ranged from 2.9 to 10.8 and night-time feeds from 1.0 to 5.1. The

daytime suckling duration (based on one 24-h record) ranged from 20 min to 4h 35

min and night-time duration from 0 to 2h 8 min. At any given age, a maximum of

only 2% of the infants were not breastfed during the night.

At 4 mo, 95% of the infants were breastfeeding and 40% were exclusively

breastfed at this age. Longer breastfeeding duration and longer duration of

exclusive breastfeeding were both associated with higher frequency of

breastfeeds, longer breastfeeding of the previous child and higher education. No

gender differences were found. Maternal smoking was associated with shorter

duration of exclusive breastfeeding, and pacifier use was associated with

shorter duration of both exclusive breastfeeding and total breastfeeding.

This study confirms that every mother-infant pair needs to be understood as a

unique dyad throughout lactation. These data demonstrate a wide range of

patterns among women who are exclusively breastfeeding and indicate that it

would be inappropriate to put pressure on individual families to adopt

preconceived patterns of infant feediing.

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warmly,

Nikki