Child-spacing and EBF Questions

[simplykate]

I'm pretty clear that traditional cultures spaced their children at least three years apart, but I'm not so clear on the breastfeeding aspect of it. Did they nurse their kids up until they were ready to conceive another? Wouldn't that put a nutritional burden on the body and kind of detract from the whole thing about building up your nutritional stores? I'm bf'ing my 19 month old and trying to decide how long to go....it doesn't feel natural to wean yet, but then I wonder if I need ample time to replenish before conceiving again.

Does anyone have more info on this?

Also, my understanding is that t here should be at least three years between children.... or is it three years between pregnancies?

Thanks! Kate

[JMJ]

I wonder about this too.  I believe most cultures breastfed until they were pregnant and then weaned (oftentimes suddenly) as soon as they got pregnant.  However, I'm not sure which cultures this trend is referring to.  I often hear about it in Africa, where breastfeeding is very well embraced, but I really wouldn't consider a lot of the cultures in Africa to be very well nourished, unfortunately.  I know a lot of cultures have taboos against nursing in pregnancy.

I believe the 3 year spacing is between births, not pregnancies, though some cultures spaced births by 4 or more years.

That said, I'm nursing a 22 month old and planning another pregnancy (though I am not yet fully fertile due to ecological breastfeeding).  I'm just stocking my body up on super nutrient-rich foods, omega 3's, and increased protein (protein will need to increase even more when pregnant) and calcium.  I'm not sure exactly how many calories and nutrients DD is using by nursing at this point, but I don't think it's so much that I can't build up my stores at this point.  I know maternal DHA decreases as nursing time goes on, so getting extra DHA is what I'm most concerned about and working on getting extra in my diet.

I would also be very careful about how you space your babies.  Hormonal birth control can deplete nutrients, so if you are using it, I would strongly recommend getting off of it for a while to rebuild your nutrients before conceiving.

[simplykate]

I'm not using hormonal birth control, just fertility awareness. If all goes as planned I'd like my next baby to be spaced at least three years from my first, maybe 3.5 years. My first pregnancy was extremely hard on me, and I was not well nourished going in to it, which is why I'm wondering about the whole breastfeeding thing. My 19 month old still nurses a lot and I wonder if she's going to slow down soon....

I'm on the GAPS diet right now, and have really started focusing on bone broths and ferments. My next step is organ meats - yuck. I'd love to add in fish roe or something along those lines, but it seems so expensive!

[JMJ]

Knowing that I was undernourished during my last pregnancy is what scares me as well.  I know that traditionally, breastfeeding was pretty much all they had to space babies, so women likely conceived while breastfeeding.  I'm less concerned about it being possible for a well-nourished woman to rebuild what she lost during pregnancy over 2+ years of breastfeeding.  Presumably the nursling is eventually getting a good number of nutrients from other places, even if nursing continues.  I'm more worried about taking my body that was undernourished for almost a quarter of a century, born from a mother who was undernourished all her life beginning from being formula fed and a grandmother who was undernourished.  I don't know how far back the vicious cycle goes, but I can't fix it all.  I can only do what I can to make it better for the next generation.

I can do a whole lot to heal my body.  I have done a whole lot, and I feel amazing, better than I have in my entire life.  My depression is gone.  I may have one bad day, but it's one bad day, not bad forever.  I have energy.  I'm not freezing cold all the time.  My digestive system is healing.  My daughter's cavities are no longer progressing.  Life is beautiful!  There are defects of my body that will never be fixed, and I won't be able to give my children perfect bodies either (from a nutritional standpoint), but if real foods can bring me to where I am after where I was before, I feel good about giving life to another child based on the best that I have to give.  It will not be perfect, but it will be a step in the right direction, and I believe that giving my children the gift of life with the best of what I have is better than not giving the gift of life out of fear that what I have isn't good enough.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend "Real Food For Mother and Baby" by Nina Planck.  This page was especially helpful.  Some foods I've added more of are oysters for zinc, avocados for Vitamin E and folate, herring/sardines for some extra Vitamin D, frozen salmon roe for a cheap source of roe for iodine, brazil nuts for selenium, and lots of seafood for omega 3's.  For folate, I'm eating what seems like an excessive amount of veggies, with a focus on the green ones.  A large green smoothie, a veggie soup that includes beans several times a week, and a 3-4 cups of veggies for dinner is how I am sure I get enough folate.  There is a little folate in a lot of foods, but you really gotta eat a lot of veggies to get enough.

This is in addition to what I was doing before: bone broth for veggie soup and cooking rice after it is soaked, cultured dairy, soaked grains, beans, and nuts, grassfed/pastured meat, wild fish, grass fed butter and ghee, coconut oil, and lots of eggs.

[serenbat]

spacing also plays a role in autism (maybe the folic levels or lack there of?)

www.boston.com/lifestyle/health/articles/2011/01/10/study_spacing_babies_close_may_raise_autism_risk/

[cocobean]

JMJ where do you get your frozen roe?  I can't find any good sources that are affordable! 

[JMJ]

My local fishmongers harvest it when they cut up the salmon and freeze it in their cheap plastic containers. Pretty much any place that deals with whole fish should have access to some from time to time. Salmon roe isn't that profitable, so a lot of places just throw it away. You may need to call ahead to ask them to save some for you.

[Holiztic]

I don't know how traditional cultures handled this, but I weaned DS at 25 months specifically so I could have 6 or so months to first, start cycling again (Ecological Breastfeeding worked perfectly for me--not so much as a spot until a few weeks after his very last nursing!) and build my health.  Of course, he's coming up on 4 in April and I am still not ready to start TTC.  Well, truthfully we just haven't felt ready to start all over again with a newborn, and that has kept me lagging on a few things, like building my magnesium and B12 (which I believe I was deficient in and which caused a number of major problems).  

We have just decided to start our official 6 months pre-prgnancy 'program', so we'll both be nutrient loading, and extra careful about toxin exposure (even more than usual), EMF's and radiation and the like.

I personally would not have felt comfortable going from pregnant to nursing to pregnant to nursing.  My best friend did and she ended up with seriously low estrogen (of course she was also using progesterone only BC while nursing the second child) and pernicious anemia, both of which have lead to a number of other issues.  Her spacing was pretty close though (18 months between births) which is clearly not ideal nutritionally.

So given the topic of this thread, can I assume Ecological BF is working for you?  I can't find anyone else that it worked for like it has for me.  I have so many friends that breastfed on demand, including at night, that all get their cycles back at 4-8 months, so I have always wondered how it worked so perfectly for me (or why it didn't for them).

[gingerbane]

I wonder a lot about this because ecological breastfeeding did not work for me with either of my girls.  With DD1 I had AF at 4 months and with DD2 AF came at 5 months.  I've heard that some people are just super fertile and if you're body is that way, it doesn't matter how much you breastfeed, your AF will come back.  I'm not sure if I believe it or not but something has to be up because there is no reason my AF should return so early.

[bodhitree]

I bet that for some women who eat an extremely nutrient-dense diet, there is a mechanism that restores fertility earlier than you would expect, even while breastfeeding. If you are very well-nourished, your body may think, "Hey, it's time to have another baby! We'd better get it done right now while there's plenty of food, before the next famine arrives!" Maybe the body "thinks" that if there is plenty of food available, the first baby is likely to get enough nourishment even if he/she isn't able to nurse as long due to the second pregnancy. That's just my guess, though.

[Holiztic]

Seems to be counter-intuitive to think that the better nourished the less likely EBF is to work, as it clearly worked in the traditional cultures that we hold up to nutritional ideal.  I have actually heard it suggested that it is the opposite, that if one is not eating a nutrient-dense diet EBF is likely to fail--this would seem to fit better with the traditional vs. modern culture.   Either way, I always thought perhaps even when a totally AP, on demand nursing mom said she nursed a lot, maybe it wasn't quite as much as she thought.  My DS nursed every 2 hours, day and night, for 2 years.  I also did not pump, though I serisouly doubt this has any bearing, as pumping should theoretically do the same thing as nursing in terms or EBF.  I have known plenty of nursing moms that DID nurse their kids to 2 or later and DID nurse on demand, but by the time the kid started solids the nursings were not every 2 hours, esp. at night (which I believe is most important for EBF).  I don't know, I really have no clue why it worked so well for me. I don't believe it's fertitlity though, got pregnant very easily after charting perfect cycles for a year, and 2 weeks after his last nursing I started cycling perfectly again.  I have every reason to believe I am very fertile.

[JMJ]

I've been wondering about this and researching this for quite a while now, and I don't have any hard and fast answers, but I do have some theories.  Here's what I have found out:

-Well nourished, traditional cultures spaced their babies with ecological breastfeeding 3+ years, often replacement rate for the culture.

-Starving, 3rd world cultures space their babies with ecological breastfeeding 3+ years.

-Studies in the USA (mostly on women who did not use birth control and likely planned their pregnancy including taking prenatal vitamins) showed that ecological breastfeeding (following the 7 standards as defined by Sheila Kippley) delayed the return of menstruation for an average of 14.5 months, though many women first bled much earlier or much later.  Those same studies showed that women in the USA did not experience a delayed return of fertility if they followed some but not all of the 7 standards of ecological breastfeeding.  (Studies by John and Sheila Kippley)

-Skinny women experience a longer breastfeeding amenorrhea than obese women.

-Anthropological studies have suggested that evolutionarily, the involvement of fathers decreased the caloric load on the mother, thus decreasing birth spacing (from a lecture by James McKenna).  (Presumably, this would apply to any mother substitutes, commonly used in the USA, some of which would not qualify under ecological breastfeeding.)

-Marilyn Shannon (Fertility Cycles and Nutrition) believes that the fertility delaying effects of ecological breastfeeding can be overridden by increasing body fat percentage and recommends doing this using carbohydrates (specifically, bread and potatoes).  If carbohydrates are not tolerated well, long chain fats might do the job.  She recommends safflower oil.  (Most polyunsaturated fats are long-chain.)

-"Advances" in agriculture that produce more calories cause population booms, not obesity.

-The amount of food available before the "advances" in agriculture did not cause people to starve, but it did keep the population at a lower level.

-Famines are caused by food that was formerly available becoming unavailable (crop failure, political unrest, corrupt rulers, etc), not by people having more children than they can feed based on the food available.

-When a town of Eskimos went from their traditional diet to a "modern" diet, including the feeding of formula, the population doubled in one generation.  The health of the town went predictably downhill.

-A woman is likely to have a similar duration of amenorrhea as her mother.  It is unknown whether this heritage is genetic, nutritional, or behavioral.

-Amenorrhea in the first 6 months seems to be largely dependent on the hormone levels.  (Hence, LAM is 99% effective.)  However, past 6 months, other factors may come more into play.

-The average woman must have about 20% or more body fat to be fertile.  Some women may need more or less.  Extra weight tends to not interfere with conception (though it does cause health problems in the mother and the baby) until insulin resistance becomes a factor (as in PCOS).

-A healthy amount of body fat for a woman is about 14-24%.

From that, it seems pretty obvious that there is some connection between how well ecological breastfeeding works and a woman's diet.  I think a lot of it may have to do with body fat.  A well nourished woman will likely be pretty close to the line between fertile and infertile as far as body fat percentage is concerned.  I wonder, but I don't have any studies to back me up, if women need a higher amount of body fat to overcome amenorrhea while ecological breastfeeding.  Loosing a small amount of weight after menstruation has returned will not likely result in a return to amenorrhea, though is may prevent her from having an adequate luteal phase, so there's some connection between breastfeeding hormones and fertility and weight that has bot been fully established.

In any case, I think that for a well nourished woman, ecological breastfeeding while maintaining a healthy diet will likely keep her below the body fat percentage threshhold for getting out of amenorrhea while keeping her and her baby healthy.  This is how it is supposed to be.  When the child is nursing less (which may happen much faster in our culture), and the breastfeeding hormones are less while the caloric load on the mother is lower, if food is available, the mother may increase her body fat percentage enough to regain fertility.  I do wonder if more breastfeeding hormones increases the body fat threshhold to regain fertility.  For example, I weigh 1.5 lbs more now than I did when I conceived DD, but I am not fully fertile yet (ovulated and began menstruation because she slept 6 hrs through the night for 1 week, but still experiencing inadequate LP's).  I know I'm only one data point, so my experience means very little.

I think that the fact that ecological breastfeeding tends to work better for well-nourished women is connected to the fact that well-nourished women tend to not be overweight.  The issue of obesity is a complex one, but in most cases, people who are obese are low on many of the nutrients that matter while people whose bodies are well nourished do not feel the need to consume more calories.  There are some nutrient deficiencies that would make people infertile, but I believe that in most cases, it is dependent more on calories stored in the body than on nutrients.  Reducing the quality of nutrition will usually just make people less healthy, not less fertile.  Eating excess empty calories, increasing body fat unnaturally, will likely override the natural infertility caused by ecological breastfeeding, causing the conception and birth of undernourished children.

Conversely, with a sustainable food supply of nourishing foods, men and women could be healthy and mostly control their fertility by moving their body fat percentage above or below the threshhold for fertility, especially through breastfeeding, without compromising health.  Through this mechanism, it would be impossible to conceive children that you couldn't feed because your body fat percentage would drop, making you infertile.

So, that's my working theory.  It needs some work, but that's where I am now.  Please tell me if you think I'm crazy or if I'm making any sense.

[cocobean]

FWIW JMJ PCOS and insulin resistance are not interchangeable.  They are connected but they are not the same thing.  Just thought I should clarify.  Also thanks for such great info! :)

[Holiztic]

Wow! Great info, I read it with much interest.  Here is what I can say for me:  I had fertile charts (as much as one can tell thorugh charting to avoid) in the 12 months leading up to TTC (which took on second month of trying).  I have been as low as 14% body fat and I would guess at time of conception I was around 18%.  I actually slowed my workouts down so as to get closer to 20.  After Ds was born, I held on to the wieght for 9 months, even put on a little extra, I bet I was at 22% or 23% during that time, but no cycles.  At 9 months PP I started to lose the weight pretty rapidly (I made no lifestyle changes at all) and was a bit below pre-pregnancy wieght (and body fat, I'd guess) by 12 months PP.  Still no cycle.  At 25 months PP I weaned DS (over 2 weeks, with night nursing going last) and roughly 2 weeks after his last nursing I got a very normal cycle and have had a super regular, normal cycle with very predictable ovulation since (nearly 2 years).  I would guess my body fat percent is around 18% but could be as high as 20%.