Eliminating dairy when breastfeeding for cmpa

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I’m currently investigating whether my daughter has cmpa as she vomits a lot and health visitor isn’t convinced that it’s reflux.
I’m bf so am cutting dairy from my diet for 2-3 weeks to see if this improves things for her.
There a couple of things I’ve gone to buy and the ingredients don’t list milk but it says something like ‘may contain milk’ or ‘made in factory that also handles milk’
My question is should I cut those items out too? It’s only been a few days and I haven’t seen any improvement yet and wondering if that’s why?
My older son had cmpa but was bottle fed from 3 weeks and diagnosed at 4 weeks so this bit is all new to me!

Hi, I had to be super strict when cutting dairy with my DTs, but lots of mums find they can loosen the reins a bit

I would suggest being strict at first, to give it the best possible shot of definitively finding out if CMPI is the issue. If so, when symptoms relieve (yay!) you could maybe experiment with the odd ‘May contain’ and see how you go.

Best advice I received sounds a bit trite but in retrospect was excellent: the days are long but the years are short — I know it’s a ball-ache cutting out anything strictly, but if it does prove to resolve the problem I promise you’ll be so ecstatic you won’t mind

Good luck! Please tell us how you get on.

Hi I have a son who was similar, a few things, one it will probably take at least a week probably two for you to see a difference. May contain will probably be ok but everyone is different. If you are replacing dairy with soya that could also be a problem as the proteins in Soya are similar those in dairy and fairly often people are allergic to both of them. Another thing that helped a lot for my son was raising the head end of the cot (books under the legs) and not laying flat in buggy. Hope some of this helps

I thought this might be the reply! There goes the Oreos 😂
She is 6 months now and has so far been treated for reflux but I’ve been saying for a couple of months that it can’t be. Gaviscon and omeprozole have done nothing so I really hope it is cmpa and things get better in the next couple of weeks. I can deal with cmpa, but not knowing why she is sick 20 or 30 times a day Is horrible! Not to mention the washing pile ☺️

I’m having oat milk as researched the best replacement in tea and it’s not too bad

My first two children had CMPA and I’m just starting a trial with my third 🙄. We’ve had allergy consultants all the way through for all of them.

You don’t need to cut out may contains or made in same factory as for this. The vast majority of those foods won’t have any dairy in at all. The risk is that on occasion they will have some. So for a severe allergy (anaphylaxis) you shouldn’t take the risk, just in case you happen to get a contaminated batch, but for delayed-type allergy especially via breast milk the risk would be so tiny and the impact so little that it isn’t worth cutting it out on the off chance.

For my son I won’t give him ‘may contain peanuts’ as he’s immediate-type allergic. As the consultant said you could give him a mars bar every day for five years and be fine because there’s no peanuts at all, then one day give him one from a contaminated batch and get a reaction.

Good luck! Make sure you’re cutting out all the small amounts of dairy especially where the protein is present (whole milk/dried milk/whey more important than butterfat/oil).

And good advice above to make sure you’ve cut out soya as well as the protein shapes are so similar you get cross-reactivity. You probably don’t need to cut out soya lecithin used in chocolate and bread as a stabiliser as it is small amounts, unless your little one is incredibly sensitive!

I was advised to cut out dairy when my son was 9 weeks old due to symptoms he was having.

I was told it could take at least 6 weeks before any observable improvement but after a month I began to see some positive changes and with two months he was like a different baby.

I was very strict and initially didn’t eat any “may contains” but I relaxed on this after about 6 months. It is advised that a lot of people who need to remove dairy should also remove soya as the proteins are over 90% alike so an allergy to dairy may also mean an allergy to soya as well.

I was dairy free for just over a year and then was told to start eating it again and see if my son could tolerate it through my milk - which thankfully he could. He couldn’t actually eat it directly though until he was almost 3 years old.

The best of luck

DS had CMPA (appears to now at least tolerate it via my milk) he was quite severe came out in rashes and everything. The dietician told me...

Made in a factory which also handles - pretty much fine. At worst there will be a minuscule cross contamination but extremely unlikely to cause a reaction
May also contain- don’t do it they could actually have put milk in

I know you didn’t ask for recommendations but... look at a site called Dilan and me it’s fab!

Food recommendations:

Chocolate Bourbon biscuits (most brands but do check label)
Bagels! (Much cheaper than free from bread. Again most are dairy free)
Crumpets
Pure sunflower spread
Booja booja ice cream (salted caramel NOM)
Oatly barrista milk (grey carton/ honestly the ONLY no dairy milk nice enough to use on cereal!)
Waitrose free from treats (bakewell tarts and chocolate cake slices)
White rabbit pizza (vegan Gardner)

Also, all the cheese/chocolate SUCKS don’t waste your money. If you ready want a choc fix try dark choc like green & blacks would recommend melting it into chocolate biscuit cake with golden syrup. Takes the bitterness away. X

I'm surprised at the advice here. My DD has severe CMPA and we eat may contains. There are some great CMPA Facebook pages and this comes up often, people always say may contains are ok. My understanding is that it's a legal thing, they can't 100% guarantee there's no dairy in the manufacturing environment so don't want sued basically. Hope you start seeing some improvement soon, CMPA/reflux/other allergies (soya, egg, coconut here!) are tough.

Yeah you don't have to cut out "may contain" stuff.

My DC has anaphylaxis and will react to the tiniest trace. The consultant said to just look at the ingredients and ignore the "may contains" UNLESS he reacted to it, in which case, don't let him eat it again. Otherwise, as she said, there would have been nothing he could eat.

Well done to you for doing this.

Thanks everyone and thank you for the recommendations.
With my son it was easy as he just would not latch and as soon as I stopped expressing and started giving him formula he was projectile vommiting and came out in large red hives, we ended up in hospital as GP wasn’t sure and they confirmed it with a blood test. As soon as he went on neocate the rash disappeared almost immediately, still had some vomit but it was 90% improved.
This time it’s the vommiting and a bit of eczema, but no mention of a test to confirm, if things improve by me cutting out dairy then they will assume that’s what it is and refer me to the dietician. I had been hoping to start weaning off the breast as a) I return to work early next year and b) she is using me for comfort in the night and I’m not exhausted! At least I would know that if she is truly hungry and would have a bottle then husband can get up and I’ll sleep in the other room for a couple of nights!
Of course I’ve started weaning her into food now too, which is fine as I make everything from scratch but because she vomits so much it’s hard to fit in food and milk still without the risk of her bringing up food if it’s too close to a milk feed.
It’s so different to when I weaned my son, there is so much more choice now thanks to the increase in vegan foods etc, when I weaned him apart from soya (which we were told to avoid until he was 1) there was only one non dairy non soya yoghurt available!

I echo pp on the fact that it took us 6 weeks to see a difference too, but again, it was suddenly like I had a different baby!

I was also told by our paediatrician that 'may contain' and 'made in the same factory as' things were all fine.

A note of optimism too - although to start with DD's reactions were quite severe, she grew out of the allergy at just over 1. At nearly 2 she is the biggest cheese-lover around!

Good luck, hope you manage to establish if this is an issue and that it resolved quickly.

Sorry to hijack your thread op, but how can you tell when your baby has grown out of the allergy? Did you just start trying to feed them the allergen in tiny quantities? I have a CMPA baby who is also allergic to soy, eggs and peanuts and would really like to check now that she is nearly a year old, but I'm scared! Don't have an allergy specialist here unfortunately as we're not in the UK.

Our paediatrician told us to start the milk ladder (info easily available on google) which introduces small amounts of dairy in gradually increasing quantities and you monitor their reactions. You might find your DC is ok with the first couple of rungs but no more, or sail through them.

We tried at 10 or 11 months and DD was fine with rung 1 and not rung 2, so we left it a few weeks. We tried again not long after her first birthday and everything was ok.

@Secretlifeofme look up somthing called the milk ladder. It explains the necessary food trials for testing tolerance to milk there are also recipies for the cmpa online. Search milk lafdr recipies. Its all ecolained. You really do need to find an allergy specialist to guide you through this though. good luck.

It took me ages to get my child through the milk ladder - the 12 step one.

He was fine on steps 1 and 2 but whenever I tried to give him something from Step 3 he would start reacting within 48 hours. It was awful and so disheartening.

He was about 14 months when I first started the milk ladder and it wasn’t until he was 2.5 years old that he was able to tolerate all the steps.

Watch out for "caseins" as they are milk derived.
I had similar problems with my children, and I didn't know about elimination with my first (who is still intolerant of cow's milk) but did it with my second, who needed me to eliminate not just dairy, but soya too (no more toasty loaf, which I was living on!)
He still has dairy issues, but no pain associated, so he eats dairy tbh.

Has anyone experienced sickness getting worse before it gets better? The last two days she’s been really bad. I am wondering if it’s because we stopped giving her the omeprozole last week? Perhaps that was helping a bit?

If she's on omeprazole then you need to keep giving her that as she's on that for reflux.

We stopped giving the omeprozole because go and health visitor think it probably isn’t reflux at all and that’s why we are now doing elimination for dairy. It didn’t seem to make any difference to her vommiting so they didn’t re-prescribe it

It can be difficult with babies really! My son as a baby was allergic to dairy and eggs, had reflux and eczema. I cut out both dairy and eggs from when he was 11 weeks for two years until he stopped breastfeeding. He had silent reflux so no vomiting but you could hear the milk going up his throat and him swallowing again. He was diagnosed at 6 months through skin prick test as the doctors refused to consider allergies because he was breastfed. He is still under the allergy team but much better now. Hope you get to the bottom of it.

How are things going, OP?

Well she seemed a little better yesterday still being sick but maybe slightly less. She doesn’t seem to do it at night feeds, well until the early morning one at 5 or 6. This makes me wonder whether it’s a milk allergy at all. As soon as she starts wriggling about (and when she’s awake she does not stop) it’s like movement makes it worse. I don’t know. I’m at the end of my tether this week, I hate not knowing what it is and feel guilty for taking so long to try and push for answers, I shouldn’t have accepted that it’s just reflux as I don’t think it’s that either. Argh!