Is Drinking Guinness Beneficial For Breast-Feeding Women?

Commonly, new moms get loads of advice — some of it respect, some not. Nonetheless, there's one rather eccentric bit of intelligence that emerges from the rest: For years, women have been told they should drink Guinness — the dull, Irish beer — to help their creation of breast milk and nourish their babies. This advice may come as a gift for mothers who are Guinness lovers. However, the question is that is this advice backed scientifically? The thing that is certain about the idea is that the facts related to it are rooted deep in history, a long time before Guinness came along. Indeed, people have been touting the milk-boosting advantages of beer for quite a long time. As far back as 2000 B.C., records demonstrate that the Sumerian people endorsed beer as a guide for breast-feeding. Alongside numerous different foods — like anise, oatmeal and fenugreek — beer was known as a "galactagogue," a food thought to fortify lactation. Throughout several years, this turned into a set up faith in customs around the globe.

Maija Bruun Haastrup, a clinical pharmacologist at Odense University Hospital in Denmark believes that it is cross-cultural. It is interesting that there is the same Old-wives tale all around, Maija added. In the mid-1900s, the promoting effort around Guinness, specifically, gave it a special identity as a "healthful" beverage. The reason being that, earlier beer was fabricated with a type of yeast which increases the iron content; it was supposedly offered to blood donors in those times, or to patients who had recently encountered a surgery. This assisted in bolstering the original slogan of the drink: "Guinness is good for you." Nursing moms were then urged to assimilate this drink as a milk-boosting tonic, as well. While we presently realize that the campaign around this beverage may have exaggerated its advantages at the time, Haastrup said there is some logical truth to the possibility that beer is beneficial as it boosts breast milk.