New Breastfeeding Diet Book
Review of Book Emphasizing How Nutrients, Toxins Impact Breastmilk
The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan analyzes how food choices benefit breastfeeding mothers and their babies.
Women who choose to breastfeed their babies do so for many reasons, but the primary motivation is usually a dedication to health. The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan [McGraw-Hill, 2006] by Robert Rountree and Melissa Block provides insights into healthy eating and its affect on both breastfeeding mother and child.
Breastfeeding Topics Covered
The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan contains information every conscientious nursing mother needs. Unlike other recipe-focused books, this book provides research-based and cited information about how food choices impact breast milk quality. The information is not intended to make women feel bad about what they eat, just to think about how changes can positively and negatively affect their bodies and their babies.
Chapters assess topics such as fats, vitamins, and minerals, and how levels of each in breast milk affect babies. Each chapter also details what fats, vitamins, and minerals a nursing mother should include in her diet. The individual sections include information about ensuring adequacy of the nutrients for mother and baby, and the best food sources. For example, omega-3 fats promote emotional well being and can be obtained by eating salmon or almonds. Additionally, The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan focuses on detoxification while breastfeeding for greater health and provides a comparison of different organic foods.
Resource Guide for Mothers
The book is not about how to breast feed, but instead to help women learn about how to improve their breast milk. The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan helps women learn how to enrich their breast milk through diet, aid their bodies and their babies’ by eliminating toxins, and establish healthy family habits for the baby’s future solid foods diet.
While many women are interested in losing postpartum weight while breastfeeding, this book emphasizes health benefits for both the mother and baby. It does not specifically detail weight-loss strategies. Instead, the book offers suggestions for changes in overall eating habits that generally lead to weight loss. Chapter nine offers meal and recipe suggestions that tie in the information previously detailed. However, for women looking for healthy recipes, The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan is more of a resource guide that requires supplementation with other topic specific cookbooks.
Decrease Breastmilk Toxins
The distinction of The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan from other nutrition books is its emphasis on breast feeding. Nursing mothers require 300-500 additional calories every day to provide high-quality breast milk for their babies. The book helps provide information about how nursing mothers can get adequate nutrition to keep up with the physical demands of motherhood and breastfeeding. Likely women will not constantly refer to the book so it is an ideal candidate to check out from the library.
Beyond just listing facts, The New Breastfeeding Diet Plan provides information about steps women can proactively take to increase the nutrients and decrease the toxins in their breast milk. Even women who are not pregnant or breastfeeding can benefit from the information about food choices available in the book.
