Re: Foods for breastfeeding mothers

[Guest guest]

Roman-

>Do walnuts make milk fattier?

Perhaps, since walnuts are fatty, but they're mostly PUFA. I'd avoid them,

at least as a staple, and only indulge occasionally. Other nuts have much

better lipid profiles, with macadamias perhaps being the best.

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[Guest guest]

Does dietary fat translates into breast milk fat? Don't carbs get converted to

fat by our bodies?

Roman

Idol wrote:

> Roman-

>

> >Do walnuts make milk fattier?

>

> Perhaps, since walnuts are fatty, but they're mostly PUFA. I'd avoid them,

> at least as a staple, and only indulge occasionally. Other nuts have much

> better lipid profiles, with macadamias perhaps being the best.

>

> -

[Guest guest]

At 01:11 AM 5/26/2002 -0400, you wrote:

>Roman-

>

> >Do walnuts make milk fattier?

>

>Perhaps, since walnuts are fatty, but they're mostly PUFA. I'd avoid them,

>at least as a staple, and only indulge occasionally. Other nuts have much

>better lipid profiles, with macadamias perhaps being the best.

Don't all nuts have PUFA? But I think walnuts have a better ratio of

Omega-3 to Omega-6.

>-

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

Alec-

>Don't all nuts have PUFA? But I think walnuts have a better ratio of

>Omega-3 to Omega-6.

All nuts do, but here's a small table I compiled of saturated,

monounsaturated and PUFA content from the USDA database:

Hazelnut 7.5 78 10.2

Olive 13.5 73.7 8.5

Avocado 11.6 70.6 13.5

Mac. 15.9 77.7 2

Almond 8.2 69.9 17.4

Walnut 9.1 22.8 63.3

Coconut 86.5 5.8 1.8

Palm 49.3 37 9.3

Cashew 19.8 58.9 16.9

I had to extrapolate a couple of them, including cashews, from the plain food.

(I doubt the formatting will come through right; sorry.)

Notice that most of them are heavily monounsaturated with some saturated

and some PUF fat with a couple exceptions -- coconut and, to a lesser

extent, palm, on one end, and walnut on the other, which is 63.3% PUFA.

As to the n6:n3 ratio, I think it's not entirely relevant with nuts because

their n3 is in a form that's not all that useful to us, but FWIW

macadamias, which are somewhat more saturated and less polyunsaturated than

most, have something like a 1:1 ratio.

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[Guest guest]

Roman-

>Does dietary fat translates into breast milk fat? Don't carbs get converted to

>fat by our bodies?

Yes, carbs are converted to fat, but we also incorporate dietary fat into

our body and therefore into breast milk, and unlike ruminants we have no

way of saturating unsaturated fats that we consume, so I'd be leery of

eating too much PUFA, particularly too much short-chain stuff which we can

only convert to the important long-chain acids like DHA at a tiny rate.

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