The Cow’s Milk & Colic Connection
When my first daughter was about 6 weeks old, she started projectile vomiting quite frequently after nursing. I met with a few pediatricians as well as a few lactation consultants and questioned whether it was the fact that I had recently started eating dairy again (after being vegan). All of them said that it was not possible that the dairy would be causing it. Well, after many weeks of elimination diets and researching on my own, I found hundreds of stories on www.mothering.com forums with Mothers who had similar issues and after removing dairy the issue went away.
Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Removing dairy doesn’t mean just for a day or two, it can mean for sometimes 2 or 3 weeks before you start to see any results. So, it’s not just something that you try and then give up on after a few days. It takes quite a long time for all of the protein to get out of your system.
The other important thing to remember is that dairy includes so many food items that you may not even realize contain milk. You really need to read the ingredient list. Luckily, now there are usually allergy warnings at the bottom of the ingredient list that will alert you if they contain dairy but it used to be that you had to read through it. So, here is a list of all of the words and products that include dairy (some are fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people seem shocked when I mention a product that to me is so obviously dairy):
Obvious:
Milk
Cheese
Butter
Yogurt
Sour Cream
Not so obvious:
Whey
Casein
Lactose
Any word that begins with or has “lact” in it
For a more in depth list, check out this great article from MIT titled, “Eating Without Casein – A Practical Primer For People with Allergies to Milk” and another helpful article I found on a blog about nursing Mom’s who need to stop eating dairy for their baby’s sake.
You can also check out some of the other posts on this blog for dairy substitutions and recipe ideas. :)