Functional Fourth Trimester
Functional fourth trimester is a podcast series for new parents- covering common postpartum challenges, practical strategies, and featuring conversations with parents and healthcare professionals.
Functional Fourth Trimester
Breastfeeding & Food Intolerances: How Mom’s Diet Affects Baby
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On this episode we talk with guest speaker Maya about her experience with infant food intolerances and breastfeeding. We discuss how a mom's diet may affect her baby through breastmilk, and what you can do about it. We also introduce an app Maya created to assist mom's in tracking symptoms, called Map My Milk. See our blog post for more information and to access resources.
Blog Post: https://www.functionalfourthtrimester.com/blog
Welcome to Functional Fourth Trimester, a podcast created to support new parents as they return to daily life after having a baby.
SPEAKER_02Each episode will talk through common postpartum challenges, share practical education and strategies, and hear from real parents and healthcare professionals along the way.
SPEAKER_00Whether you're listening during a feeding, a walk, or a quiet moment, this space is for you. I'm Lauren.
SPEAKER_02And I'm Melissa, and we're excited to jump right into today's topic.
SPEAKER_00Some babies experience intolerances to certain proteins in breast milk, resulting in undesirable symptoms such as skin issues and digestive concerns. Today we are going to be talking all about the connection between a mother's diet and potential adverse reactions in the infant and what you can do in this situation.
SPEAKER_02I am happy to introduce our guest speaker today, Maya. She's an occupational therapist and a mom who developed an app called Map My Milk. It is a specialized digital platform designed to help breastfeeding families navigate infant food protein intolerances and allergies. The app helps families find correlations between moms' diets and baby symptoms.
SPEAKER_00Yes, welcome, Maya. We are so glad that you are here. Yeah, thank you for having me. I would love to start off with if you could just give a brief explanation of what your app is. Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_01So it's a it's a new platform where moms can track what they're eating, track baby symptoms, and then it has a pattern analysis feature that runs all the data from mom and baby and tries to see what is correlated so that mom can then bring that information to her different providers and make better decisions about how to move forward with infant allergies.
SPEAKER_00Gotcha. That's such a cool concept. And I think it's something that's I had never heard of until I had heard of this one. So I think it's something that's so needed. And I would also love to hear about like what led you to this idea to be able to create it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So I developed this out of a personal need. So I have two children, a one-year-old and a three-year-old. And both of them, when they were infants, exhibited signs of potential infant food allergies. They were reacting to something in my breast milk, actually, that I was eating because there's a transfer of proteins, just to like speak science a little bit. The food proteins that mom eats are metabolized and break down and do transfer through the breast milk to baby system. And sometimes those babies are sensitive or allergic to what mom is eating. And it can be really hard to figure out what that is. The most common infant food allergy is called cow's milk protein allergy. I've seen that that impacts anywhere from 4 to 13% of infants. So it's it's pretty common actually. And with my first eliminated dairy from my diet and she got better. So the symptoms that she was having were mucusy stool, extremely colicky, painful cramping. And after about a month of eliminating dairy from my diet, she got better. And a lot of moms are able to, with a doctor's guidance, eliminate dairy if they think that's what's going on. And baby does very well. And then when my second baby was born last January, I eliminated dairy and nothing was getting better. She was very sick, none of us were sleeping. And that's when I started to feel desperate of like, okay, so it's not dairy, it's something else. And this was all in guidance with my providers, you know, pediatric GI and ENT, who were saying, yeah, she is probably intolerant or allergic to a different food that you're eating. Um, and so at that point, um, I had two options, basically, well, I had three options. Stop breastfeeding entirely, um, which was I was, you know, looking forward to breastfeeding longer, a total elimination diet, which is like eliminating 12 foods from my diet and not eating anything, basically, in the hopes that one of those foods is the magic winner, or to try to figure out what it is. And that's when I started looking for tools to help me figure it out. And that's when I realized there was nothing like that. And um I'm an OT, I'm a problem solver. So that's when I was like, you know what? I'm gonna make the tool that I need. So that's pretty much how I got started.
SPEAKER_02I'm surprised that it's not more infants that are affected. The percentage you said, I was like, wow, that's actually really low. But then I could see where it could be other foods coming in. But eliminating all of those foods from your diet, that's hard. I've done an elimination like that not well breastfeeding, and that's hard in itself. And so I can't imagine, you know, breastfeeding and eliminating all those foods and then slowly reintroducing them. That's a process that no mom really should have to deal with or wants to deal with because you're just trying to survive at that point. So I love that you have created something that is able to help walk them through this process without having to do what you were gonna have to do, which is eliminate basically everything. You're gonna be eating carrots and apples, you know, like nothing if you do that. And that's really not possible when you're breastfeeding.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, it is a total elimination diet, it is necessary for some people. I don't want to say that's never indicated. It is indicated in some situations, but it's extremely difficult. I mean, on multiple levels. So there's like the nutrition aspect, right? Like if they are, they're they're missing so many key nutrients there that they have to try to make up. There's the like the calorie issue, right? Um, in terms of you need to maintain your calories if you're trying to breastfeed. There's the mental health aspect, which is already challenging immediately postpartum, right? And then telling a mom she can't eat that she has to worry about every bite, basically, which I that's how I felt. I'm like, every bite, every time I'm about to eat, I'm like, is this going to send her, you know, into a painful crisis like tonight? Or is this going to cause blood in tomorrow's diaper? And then that stress, that worry on top of everything else we're already dealing with in that fourth trimester.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Am I even going to get any sleep tonight if she eats this food?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. That's such a good point. Like you shouldn't have to be worrying and stressing about every single thing you're eating and putting into your body and not knowing if it's going to cause some sort of some sort of reaction within the baby. Right. And I think it's so valuable that you created this because like the two options shouldn't only be stopping breastfeeding and an elimination diet. Like there should be a third option, which is finding out what's happening. And doing that totally by themselves would be a lot more challenging than having an app to kind of help support and connect the dots.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Yeah, I mean, if you're doing it yourself, it can be done, sure, but it's a lot harder, right? So then you're talking about manually tracking and manually trying to connect the dots. So another piece that I should mention with like this transfer of proteins is that there's a delayed reaction, right? Mom has to ingest it and metabolize it and then feed her baby, and then baby has to metabolize it before those like upper and lower GI symptoms start coming up or the rash symptoms. So putting together those pieces and every baby's different and proteins transfer at different timelines, it's just really hard. So Mat MyMilk sort of puts that all together in like nice dashboards, like easy to understand uh reports and information that she mom doesn't have to do any math anymore, basically. She's doing enough math about like nap time.
SPEAKER_02So yeah. So then kind of to go into the Mat My Milk a little bit more because you're saying that obviously mom has to metabolize it, then baby has to metabolize it, and it can be different timelines in the app. How does mom go back and reflect on, oh, I'm seeing that anytime I eat this, that it's causing these issues? Are they entering information? Like, how are they entering information into the app? What does that look like on mom's end?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so there's a log form basically where she's either logging her food, uh, formula, baby solids, or symptoms, right? So that's where she's gonna log all her information. And my goal, you know, thinking about context as an OT. This is like, you know, sleep deprived. She's maybe doing it in the middle of the night. The form has to be as simple as possible. And I'm still always iterating on the design and the UI. Like I'm always trying to improve and make it easier and faster because that's so important, you know, for long-term use of a tech tool, it needs to be fast and easy. So mom is just logging her data. Um, she we have this like a label scanner, and it she can take a quick picture of the food that she's eating, and it's automatically gonna say which triggers are in the food, which is especially helpful because a lot of these triggers have multiple names. So, like an example, um, you know, egg is albumin, like corn is dextrose, like these are things like someone might not know. And if they're trying to track corn, like that they think maybe it's corn, they aren't gonna necessarily know all the names. So the app takes care of that. They just snap a picture, the time stamped, um, and the the app on the back end is storing all that information and then finding that those core those mathematical correlations, basically. Um, and in terms of time settings, Melissa, you asked. So basically we let the user decide, I want to see what are the correlations between, you know, in a short period after I nurse. So, you know, six to 12 hours, or I want to see up to 72 hours what's going on. There's a quick little preset buttons she can flip through and see what's happening right after I breastfeed, what's happening in this like 12 to 24 hour period, what's happening 72 hours, and she can set that. Okay, it's very customizable. Um, so a mom can, with her providers, with her lactation consultant, mom with guidance can look at her data in different ways and figure out what's going on. On the food log, she can either take a picture and it automatically selects, or if she's cooking at home or she's at a restaurant, she can quickly just tap all the like top 12 triggers are there. And then um pro users can also add anything that they're maybe sus like suspicious of seeds, you know, seed oils, whatever. If someone is suspicious of a specific ingredient, they can add that to the list and then just quickly tap them for every meal, basically, what was in there.
SPEAKER_00I love how one of your like kind of goals with this app is to make it really accessible and easy to use. Because I think that's something that's so important in that postpartum period where they have, you know, 10,000 other things going through their brain and all sorts of responsibilities, that having something that's quick and efficient is really important for being able to actually use it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's always, I'm always working on that, like in terms of accessibility and like the latest thing I'm working on adding is like voice to text. So mom doesn't even have to type anything. She can just send a little voice memo and it will automatically log everything for her. So that's awesome.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love that idea. I know you've kind of touched on this a little bit, but I would love to hear more about like some of those kind of signs that people see in the infant. Like I think you mentioned a rash and some like digestive issues. Like, what is something that like to kind of look out for that if a parent sees they might be like, oh, maybe something's going on with an intolerance?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So I would say typically it's those GI symptoms. Um, so mucusy diaper, mucus in the diaper, blood in the diaper. Um, and actually the like diagnostic criteria for cow's milk protein allergy is blood in the diaper, and it doesn't even have to be visible blood. It's like the doctor's office will do a test strip and see if there's microscope. It's called, you know, occult blood, basically in the diaper. So mucus, blood, um, maybe really like more behavioral, like extreme colic, which means excessive crying, like for hours on end, inconsolable. Um, so maybe this is a baby that is screaming, crying all night, every night. Um, that's something that's like, what's what's going on there? Um, rashes, specifically like eczema, can be a symptom, um, which is tricky because that's even more delayed over time to start showing up and developing, um, vomiting, reflux, um, and you know, all these things can be normal to a certain extent in a baby. Um, so especially, you know, spitting up, um, babies spit up, right? Um, and babies can be rashy also. So I think it's important, like for any mom wondering, to talk to a doctor, a lactation consultant, um, an allergist first. I want to be clear that like Mat MyMilk is not a diagnostic tool. It does not replace medical advice, it's a tracking tool to um empower families with data to bring to their doctors. So I never want a mom to use what's she's getting in the app and make a medical decision for herself or her baby based on that. It's it's a tracking tool, basically. So, yeah, those are some of the symptoms, and it's really important for a mom to talk about them with the doctor because they can be normal to a certain extent or they can be due to something else entirely. And that's what's really tricky about this issue in general, is that it's very gray.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, definitely. Like it could be one of a whole bunch of different things. Yeah. So it sounds like if somebody is using this app and there seems to be a correlation popping up, kind of the next step would be bringing that information to have a conversation with your healthcare provider and basically use it as like a hey, this is kind of something I'm observing, something I'm seeing, a correlation that might be there. Can we, you know, talk further about that?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. So if a mom doesn't have this app, I feel like she's going to a doctor's office and trying to explain what she's been witnessing or seeing in her baby, but the she doesn't have anything to show. And so then even she's like trying to remember, like the doctor might ask, well, how many nights a week is this happening? And she's even like trying to remember mentally, and that's so hard, versus like being able to pull up your phone and show the dashboard, show the reports. Um, it's just really giving her more control in those appointments. And then I think this is a great time to bring up free to feed, um, which is an amazing service. They have one-on-one consultations with nurses, lactation consultants, and allergists to for specifically this issue of food reactivity. And we are partners with them. Um, so we are their tracking tool, and um Mat MyMilk users can get 20% off of their free-to-feed consultations. And that's like a real great place to talk one-on-one with a provider and show them the dashboard and and figure out what's going on. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00It sounds like such a beneficial tool, especially like for a new parent who's already sleep deprived, who already has a hard time remembering and keeping track of things, to be able to have that physical tool to be like, here's what's happening at home.
SPEAKER_01And we also have a place for moms to take pictures and store them all in one place, right? Because for me, I was taking pictures of diapers and rashes, but then I would be at the doctor and I'd have to scroll through all the other hundreds of pictures I had taken that day of them playing or whatever. And this is like it's a folder basically of all the diaper pictures, all the rash pictures in one place. Mom again just has to pull up the app and she can show the doctor all that information in one place.
SPEAKER_02I love how you've taken your experience and made something that is helpful for other moms because I've seen moms walking through this journey where they're like, I don't know what it is, I don't even know where to start. I eliminated the dairy, but that doesn't really seem to be helping. And there's you know a lot of other things that it can be, and every baby is different, every mom is different, and it can be even from infant to infant, like you, like your first one, you eliminated the dairy and everything was fine. And so you probably went into number two and thought, we just won't do dairy and everything's gonna be fine. And so having you know that second go-around where you're like, now I need to figure out what to do here, and like Lauren was saying just a minute ago, that like you already have you're tired, you already you know can't even think straight anyway, and then being able to try to remember all of this stuff. So it sounds like you've got a lot of great things into your app where the pictures where they can keep those organized and they can have the data all there in one place, and you know, so when they do go to their doctor, they can be like, This is what I have, this is what's happening, these are the pictures I have, and hopefully they can go through a process of elimination and figure out what is it that's causing these issues that are keeping us awake at night, that are and I feel like nighttime is the hardest because that's usually when the baby is gonna be laying there flat by themselves, and that's when they start to notice that they their their tummy doesn't feel good or their skin is itchy or whatever it might be. Because during the day you can hold them, they can be distracted, they can have those different pressures and inputs that kind of take away from those other feelings. But then when we get to nighttime, there's nothing else that's distracting them from those those uncomfortable things that they're dealing with. So that's kind of when those those hard situations tend to come up the most, is at night when we all just want to sleep because we're tired.
SPEAKER_01Yes, exactly. And then it's like a cycle, right, of just like exhaustion and stress, and it is so often in the night as well. And I think just going back to what you said about like how it's helpful for moms and families to go into appointments with information. I think as an OT, and I work in a hot I work in a cancer hospital. Like that's like my, you know, day job. And I see patients struggling all the time, like with health literacy, with trying to remember and self-advocate in those appointment, you know, doctors doing rounds and comes in and they've been wondering all these things and maybe have a like a list in their head, but then the doctor comes in and suddenly they're blanking out, and then the doctor leaves and they're like, wait, I didn't get to ask them anything. I didn't get to show them or explain to them like my symptoms today. So I think in that sense, my clinical experience has really helped me build a better platform.
SPEAKER_00Definitely. That's awesome. I can totally see how it would help kind of improve somebody's health literacy and be able to give somebody a little bit more empowerment and encouragement going into an appointment that they know what to talk about, they know what questions to ask, they know what information to present to the doctor. That way they're not leaving the appointment, like regretting not bringing something up or they remember it an hour later.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And speaking of health literacy, I don't have it yet, but I'm working on adding a sort of a clinical content page with just information, right? Um, because these days with the internet, with AI, like there is so much information and misinformation on this topic, which is already a kiff a confusing topic due to what I explained, which is that there's a million reasons for these symptoms sometimes. So I want a centralized location for just objective clinical information. I hope to be adding that definitely before the end of the year.
SPEAKER_02Especially since Google and AI are gonna pull from what they think might be relevant content, and it's not always so having a space for moms to be able to go and be like, okay, this is what research actually shows and information they can trust from somebody who has created this knowledge base that is perfect for moms.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Speaking of AI, I had read connected with a mom on Reddit who was using AI to try to figure out her baby's triggers. And I just want to um sort of like make a quick cautionary statement about that. I just did my own little experiment. You know, we know these like basic language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are not like specific or trained in every issue. They're just calling information from, you know, general population and predicting the next word in their response, basically. Um, I did an experiment where I uploaded my real data between me and my baby food logs and symptom logs from two weeks. And I asked Gemini, like, help me figure out what my baby's triggers are. And it was so scary. The response was literally making up information. It was like, on this date, you ate chicken and then baby had a rash. And that wasn't even true. So I just want to caution moms to be very careful about how they're using AI specifically for health and medical um purposes. Um, and I Was very careful. Like, there is no AI integration on our analysis page specifically for that reason. So the math, the um correlational formulas uh were developed by myself and a senior biostatistician. They're hard-coded into the platform. So there's no like AI hallucinations, there's no, you know, mistakes. Like it's literally just finding the math there. And I just, yeah, having seen that firsthand, like how that experiment work went for me, I'm very nervous that moms are going to be asking Chat GBT to figure this out. And it's just, it's not meant, it's not built for that.
SPEAKER_02So that totally makes sense. And I I could see that as well. But I always like to tell people that AI it's a yes mean. So it's just gonna tell you what it thinks you want to hear or what it thinks might be relevant from the internet, and it's not always what you want to hear or what's relevant. So having your resource, I think, is so important and getting the word out there so that moms aren't going to Google or AI, which Google now, a lot of the times the first thing that pops up is that AI response. So that can be where our eyes are first drawn to is oh, well, it's summarizing that this is, you know, what I need to do, and that might not be what you need to do. So being able to have your resource source and have that all of that information put together and then go to their doctor or their lactation consultant, whoever they're working with, and say, like, hey, this is where I'm at, this is what I the information I have, what should I do next? I think it's so valuable. It takes I feel like it's gonna take so much to that stress and weight off of parents' shoulders when you're going through that. I mean, I say like having a baby is one of the most amazing, but also one of the hardest things that you can do. It's it's so special, but it's a huge life change. Whether it's your first baby, second baby, third baby, whatever it is, it's hard. And so having that peace of mind with you giving them this guidance through this journey to be able to kind of hold them and figure out what's going on, and then be able to use those resources to take to their doctor is so helpful so that they're not going and getting information that's not correct and maybe cutting chicken out of their diet because Google's telling them that their baby's allergic to chicken or something. Like, we don't want that. It's already hard enough without having misinformation, and then that chicken might not work, and so they're gonna cut something else out. Who knows?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's exactly right, and that's really at the core of like why I built this, having gone through it personally. The fourth trimester is hard enough. Like having a newborn baby is hard enough. And I just like I love thinking about like quality of life improvements and just being in routines and having a baby who's possibly allergic to something you're eating is a huge disruption of your routine and your quality of life and your independence and in being able to move through your day. So just yeah, as a mom who went through it as an OT, this was just such an obvious tool that needed to exist. So I'm so happy to be able to bring it uh into creation and for other moms to be able to use it.
SPEAKER_00If a mom is listening right now and is like wondering, oh, this sounds really interesting. Like, how can I get started with this? Like, what do they do to be able to get access to this app? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So that mom can go to www.mapmyilk.com m-a-p M Y M I L K dot com. All she has to give is her email address and she creates a password. We don't even collect name, no child health data other than the symptoms, but nothing connected to her child. And she creates an account. She has a 14-day free trial with full features. At the end of the 14 days, she can um choose to upgrade to keep those more advanced features, or she can remain at a free level and continue using all the basic features so she can still log all her food, all of baby symptoms, and she can still get basic pattern analysis. She's just not going to get more of those details, but we have that free tier always to continue using it.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. That sounds great. I love that we can share it on this platform to help other moms figure out you know how to have a better journey with them and baby in that fourth trimester and beyond.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you so much for giving me a space to talk about it. And um, if anyone has any questions, they can also reach out, send shoot me an email to info at matmymilk.com. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat one-on-one with any mom who is struggling with this. Whether or not she signs up, I'm happy to just chat through it as a mom who went through it.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much to our guest speaker, Maya, for joining us today and talking all about her app, MatMyMilk. All of her contact information and ways to access the app will be available in the description and on our blog post at the postpartumot.com. If you are a parent listening to this and are struggling with certain symptoms that you're seeing in your baby, we would suggest that you look into using this app as a tool to help you be better informed when discussing concerns with your healthcare providers. Thank you all so much for joining us today. We're so glad that you're here, and we will talk with you guys next time.
SPEAKER_02I hope today's conversation gave you something practical to take into your day or simply remind you that what you're experiencing is normal. Returning to daily life after birth is a process, and support matters.
SPEAKER_00However, your day continues from here, be gentle with yourself. You're doing important work. Thanks for listening. We'll meet you back here next time.