Smoking And Breastfeeding - article by Good English Article Sites

Smoking and Breastfeeding

Well, New Year's is around the corner, and you can count on it that a lot of people are going to want to get on the wagon - quit smoking. And a large part of that audience is likely to be women - for various reasons. Most of them have to do with how women are somewhat better equipped to have children than men. For instance, smoking (or any kind of nicotine, actually) does not go with oral contraceptives, it brings on menopause more quickly, makes women infertile, makes their periods more troublesome, and makes breast cancer a more threatening possibility. Women can still learn to live with these risks for the most part, if it weren't for the problem of pregnancy. Breastfeeding and smoking alongside hardly makes anyone feel good, least of all the baby. Of course there is a lot of sanctimonious preaching out there that you could read up any time you want to be lectured, but let's have some practical thoughts in this area. As hard as they try, some women just can't quit. How does it help to just make them feel bad about themselves?

We could just, instead, talk about how to minimize the effects on the baby of smoking and breast-feeding at the same time. To begin with, it isn't a good idea to just stay away from breast-feeding if you wish to smoke after childbirth. Nicotine in the milk is not an ideal situation of course, but the nutrition and the resistance to disease that it helps the baby with, are certainly noted to bring on greater benefits than risks. If anything should make a nursing mother guilty, it should be quitting nursing, and not smoking alongside of it. Of course, when you are smoking and breast-feeding at the same time, the quantity of milk produced can tend towards the lower side; the quality of the milk tends to change too. Breast milk in smoking mothers tends to have less iodine, and less prolactin, a hormone that the baby needs to digest the milk properly. Lactation also tends to stop earlier.

So how do you minimize whatever risk that smoking and breastfeeding together bring? To begin with, you need to at least cut down. The smaller the smoking habit, the smaller the risk to your baby. Smoking right before breast-feeding or during it can actually be dangerous to your baby - can put a lot of nicotine in your milk. A good rule of thumb is to wait about two hours between smoke and a breast-feeding round. That's as long as it takes for the body to get rid of all the nicotine. But if you think about it, it just happens to be an unpleasant truth that recreational drugs, marijuana and the like are not to be ruled out as possibilities for breast-feeding mothers either. Among poorer mothers, this just happens to be a fact of life, whether or not we like it (actually, they say one in five pregnant women use it, how's that?). These drugs are really addictive, and they say that it can actually change the shape of the baby's brain. If a mother is able to be sober enough to observe proper cleanliness when mixing formula for the baby, that is far better than breast-feeding. Well this is what they call a dilemma - being in a position where he has to make a choice between two equally unacceptable alternatives. But that is life, isn't it?

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