To think this woman is at best misguided and at worst disgusting?

[Totality22]

Will try to be brief.

I was introduced to a friend of a friend who is ebf her DS (about 10 weeks) and it came up in conversation that she drinks a bottle of wine in one evening once / twice a week. She was unashamed but made it clear she didn't neck it back (drinks it over the course 4-5 hours)

Once I picked my jaw up off the floor the conversation had moved on but I am still thinking about it days later.

I like a drink, can happily open a bottle and finish it the same evening [over the course of a good few hours, like the lady in question]. I had a glass of champers when 8 months pregnant so I am certainly not adverse to the notion of drinking / pregnancy / BF'ing.

AIBU to find this woman shocking though?

To not drip feed woman is a medical professional not trained in UK and currently a SAHP here, her husband is a Dr, she is not English [culturally I assume this may be relevant as maybe the info is different to here?], and she did this with her first baby who is now 5 and perfectly fine.

Superwoman, no, when you breastfeed you are not sharing your body with your baby, not in the same way as when you are pregnant anyway.

As someone pointed out upthread, breastmilk is made from you blood, not the contents of your stomach.

I also totally agree with the poster above who said that if you make breastfeeding harder than it needs to be by putting all sorts of spurious restrictions on the mother (like she mustn't drink), then the result will be that mothers will wean earlier, which will have a much bigger impact on the health of babies than the mother drinking some wine.

I have been breastfeeding for 6 years now,

it'll probably be 8 years, without a break by time I finish (assuming no more babies now). When pregnant i've not drunk, but outside of that, i've certanly had several occasions where i've drunk as the OP described.

Would you rather I weaned my kids so i can have a drink?!

Or should I become tee-total for the best part of a decade, not on the basis of any scientific fact, but because people just feel it must be wrong to drink while feeding?

I think its vastly over stated, generally by people who don't know anything about it. Like the nurse who advised me to stop drinking milk as my baby might be lactose intolerant , or the IL who insisted I should have a sugar free diet so the child didn't get used to sugar/get fat, or the people who advised me not to eat garlic or onions or cabbage so as to avoid colic....all utter rubbish.

Mintyy I do think that diet affects breastmilk, yes.

I just can't see any evidence that alcohol specifically is transferred into milk at a level that will cause a threat to a baby.

If you're taking about lactose intolerance for example that's a totally different thing.

Everyone I know drank while BF. Including lots of medical professionals. It's a non issue unless she is totally trashed every night

There is a lot of fricking bollocks talked about breastfeeding, is why.

She is not drinking more than recommended amounts. For her, maybe. For breastfeeding, no.

It is really not the same as drinking in pregnancy.

The biological norm is to feed for years on end - it is unnecessarily restrictive and offputting to keep spouting myths about what bizarre things you have to avoid. There are certain drugs that we know are unsafe, and yes of course it's a good idea to check especially something like alcohol.

If you look at the wikipedia article on blood alcohol level it shows that to be even at 0.2% you'd be comatose. There's a handy chart on there too where you can put units drunk against body weight and guesstimate your blood alcohol level based on that.

"It's a non issue unless she is totally trashed every night"

I'm not convinced.

How does the body process alcohol in such a way that it doesn't affect breastmilk when it does affect the blood stream (or whatever else it is that makes it so dangerous to drink heavily when pregnant).

I am genuinely interested to learn here!

There's evidence that what breastfeeding mothers ingest can pass through breast milk in small amounts, of course Minty. But the evidence suggests that in moderation, that will have no negative impact on the baby unless they have specific allergies. Personally, a bottle of wine was more than I was comfortable with when feeding a baby. But I did do it a couple of times when feeding an older toddler. I've been happy to get properly back on the gin since he stopped feeding.

I cannot believe the relaxed attitudes on here, to regularly drinking a bottle of wine in a one night.

It's a ridiculous amount to drink twice a week. Are you all bonkers? .

Possibly a bit less bonkers than I'd be without the booze.

There was a thread about this years ago and someone posted all the calculations. They got it down to the fact that three bottles of wine in less than an hour would start to affect the baby which seems to be consistent with, "if you can't hold the baby / have forgotten you even have one, don't BF"

Bake off, I am not a fan of big drinking, but accept that we live in a culture where other people are.

Like other posters, I breastfed for years. I am sick of all the criticising of women and making up rules about what they should do, based on conjecture.

Oh that sounds such great advice, along with being exhausted through lack of sleep, which always happens with a new baby, drink as much as you like, as long as you can "hold the baby and don't forget you have one"

It's not to do with how the body processes alcohol, it's to do with what happens to the alcohol while it's inside the body.

Breastmilk is basically blood minus red blood cells, and fat. Anything fat-soluble or present in the blood will make its way through. But the baby is getting the substance at whatever concentration it is within the blood. For alcohol it's pretty much 1:1 with blood content. If you imagine drinking somebody's blood when they've had a glass of wine, it's clearly obvious that their blood isn't going to be nearly alcoholic enough to even register let alone get you as drunk as drinking the wine directly. It is the same with breastmilk.

During pregnancy you're talking about which substances cross the placenta. The mother and the baby don't directly share blood, but they share nutrients and such via blood so any nutrients and other substances present in the blood will go directly to the infant's bloodstream as well. The placenta screens some toxins out but it's not a liver, and it's not that good of a screen.

It's just a different thing entirely. To take another example, THC, the drug in cannabis, is fat soluble and passes through to milk at a much higher rate, more like 4:1. Yet it is less harmful in pregnancy as it has a very short half life within the blood. In some countries/cultures it is used to alleviate morning sickness and I've even heard some people recommending it for early labour pain. I wouldn't suggest that, but the evidence shows that it isn't as harmful to babies in this form. (The smoking is a worse issue).

Drinking three bottles of wine in an hour would be terrible even without a baby, but as a pp said, unless you're a hardened alco, it's not going to happen so drinking moderately is fine.

Bakeoffcake the question was not about whether it was a problem for the mother, or whether she was too drunk to care for her baby.

The OP was judging the mother because she was breastfeeding, and we are pointing out that her judginess is based on misinformation, and unfair.

If she'd said "someone i know drinks lots of wine, should she be doing this?" She would have got very different answers, including several focusing on the mother's health I imagine. And if it was the mother's health or ability to care for the bsby that was at question, the breastfeeding but would be irrelevant.

But no, she wanted to beat the mother over the head with her judgy stick because she was both breastfeeding and drinking, but she was wrong to do so.

Do you see?

I bf for years too. If the OP had said the woman drank 1 or even 2 glasses regularly, I'd think, whatever floats your boat(I personally wouldn't as I don't like alcohol very much) but for people to say a whole bottle with a young baby, is ok, makes me think, wtf. I can't believe people are trying to justify it.

Trust me, I love a drink. I know I drink too much. It is permanently on my To Do List Of Issues To Address.

I occasionally (few times a year) drink a whole bottle of wine with no ill effects, although on the whole I'll stop at half a bottle.

I wouldn't have dreamt of doing either when breastfeeding, let alone twice a week, regularly.

Are people actually reading the op or just wanting to get in a froth about their right to drink when breastfeeding?

'As someone pointed out upthread, breastmilk is made from you blood, not the contents of your stomach'

Alcohol doesn't stay in your stomach though, it travel through to your blood stream.

I'm by no means suggesting women shouldn't drink when breastfeeding. I drank fairly often through the 2.5 years I breastfed. The thing is, you won't find many breastfeeding mothers that drink that much when breastfeeding. I did on occasions and it gave my baby the shits. Not very nice and by no means my proudest moment.

It's all very well that 0.01% of alcohol travels through to breastmilk but unless there is solid research looking at the effects of alcohol in breastfed babies you won't know the answer.

But this isn't a discussion about whether it's a sensible amount to drink in general. It's a discussion about whether it's likely to cause harm to a breastfeeding baby. Which it's not.

X posted Wiggy. Yes I do see that.

I think I get a bit het up as my mother was an alcoholic so I probably am getting too cross about this.

I agree with wiggly

The scare-mongering around what you can / can't /must / mustn't do while pregnant is bad enough. Women who have accidentally had one sip of wine and freaking out that they will have given their baby FAS. Women being presented with advice to avoid all household chemicals (!), all sorts of different foods, advice that is constantly changing and women being refused goods and services when people spot a bump.

Extending this to BF women, when we have low levels enough already in the UK, will hardly help. So no caffeine, no alcohol, no citrus, no dairy, etc etc and so on. Recommended BF for 2 years, at which point many women have anotehr one.

So women are being told to stop doing just so much stuff, for years and years on end, for no medical reason whatsoever.

I don't know why. Why do people like to see this? Is it because of some kind of image of the self-sacrificing mother being the ultimate aim? Or not even the ultimate aim but the norm? If you want to have children, as a woman, you need to stop doing loads and loads of stuff for years on end, probably fuck your career prospects and so on and so forth and god forbid you don't do it all with a smile?

Or what? WHY are people so keen to tell women what they must do when it comes to pg / bf, and the things are always to do with sacrifice on the woman's part, and when there is no medical reason it's all "oh well you can't be sure so you ought to do it anyway. Just in case"...

WTF.

No, it's not that 0.01% of alcohol travels through to breastmilk, that's not even right. Did you know orange juice is legally allowed to be up to 0.5% alcoholic? Most fruit juice contains around 0.1-0.3% alcohol. Shock horror, people give that to babies and toddlers all the time. It's not mentioned on the labels because we metabolise this as fast as we drink it, even children.

Yeah, it's wikipedia, but this article has been consistent for several years and it's very well broken down.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content

Your baby might have suffered diarrhoea on occasions that you drank, but it's likely to be a coincidence, picked up by you because you were looking for potential effects. Just as many women notice wind in their babies after eating cabbage, or drinking fizzy drinks, or eating citrus - it's just a confirmation bias.

Bakeoffcake

Right you are Bertie. So very high alcohol consumption does not affect an infant via breastmilk? Is that what you are saying?

I had no idea and am slightly blown away. Luckily I will never be pregnant or breastfeed again, otherwise I might have found that slightly boggling.

I've breastfed two babies for over a year each and neither have ever had a reaction to anything I've eaten or drunk. Coffee, tea, chocolate, citrus or whatever never produced any noticeable effects whatsoever. My first baby was a great sleeper and I'd drink two to four cups of black filter coffee a day, maybe an espresso after dinner. We both slept fine. My second doesn't sleep at all and I've tried cutting all sorts out of my diet to no avail. So in my opinion, diet doesn't affect breast milk.

A bottle of wine would render me too drunk to look after a baby. But I'm bewildered by the OP's horror at the woman holding a glass of wine WHILST FEEDING. Do you think something you drink passes directly down your throat and out of your nipple? Because, seriously, unless you're only drinking breast milk yourself, nothing you consume will do your baby any favours if you feed it to them directly, which is why the body has a filtering system!