“Don’t drink cold!”
“Don’t eat ice cream!”
I’ve heard this so many times from people who knows that I’m breastfeeding. They said that if I eat or drink anything cold, my baby will get sick.
This is not true!
Read below to see the reasons why this is and will remain a myth:
Everything that comes out from us is warm, that includes breastmilk
This is what we call thermoregulation. It’s our body’s way of maintaining the temperature of our body at a level where our cells could function normally. So, any food or drink you eat goes down and gets processed by our digestive system to produce energy. With all the metabolism (the complex of physical and chemical processes occurring within a living cell or organism that are necessary for the maintenance of life), it’s kind of impossible for our cold drink or food to make our breastmilk cold.
Actually, the more we drink or eat cold during summer days, the more we produce heat. According to theconversation.com, “While it may seem logical that introducing something cold, like ice cream, into the stomach should help reduce temperature, its initial cooling effect is rapidly replaced by heat generated by digestive processes needed to break down the nutrients in ice cream. Digesting calorie-rich food leads to an increase in body temperature.” When you drink something cold, your body automatically works extra hard to bring the temperature back to normal. So, before our food and drink even get turned into breastmilk, it already went through so many processes that produce energy and heat.
Even if the breastmilk that comes out of your breasts turns out to be cold, your child still won’t get sick from it because…
Your child’s colds and coughs are caused by a virus, a bacteria, or an allergen.
Viruses, bacteria, and allergens are everywhere! They can get them in the air, from the things they touch, from the people they encounter, and not from your breastmilk.
Getting a cold actually makes a child immune to a certain virus (ie. if you get sick from virus A, you can’t get sick from that virus A again), that is if the cold is not caused by an allergen. But there are over 200 different varieties of the common cold virus. So, don’t be surprised when your kid gets a lot of them. Kids, especially those who are younger than 2 years old gets colds 8 to 10 times a year. Kids also get colds when the climate is cold (winter / rainy season), because the cold air tends to be dry which can irritate the throat and the lungs.
Go enjoy your glass of icy water and don’t let anyone stop you from eating ice cream (unless your baby reacts to dairy, which is a completely different story.)
References:
- Answer of Question of Temperature & Body Fluid Regulation | Biology Boom. (2017). Biologyboom.com. Retrieved 10 April 2017, from http://biologyboom.com/answer-of-question-of-temperature-body-fluid-regulation/
- Colds in children. (2017). PubMed Central (PMC). Retrieved 10 April 2017, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722603/
- Common Cold. (2017). Kidshealth.org. Retrieved 10 April 2017, from http://kidshealth.org/en/parents/cold.html
- Health Check: do ice cream and cold drinks cool us down?. (2017). The Conversation. Retrieved 10 April 2017, from http://theconversation.com/health-check-do-ice-cream-and-cold-drinks-cool-us-down-34492
- Is Drinking Cold Water Bad for Health?. (2017) that site. Practo.com. Retrieved 10 April 2017, from https://www.practo.com/healthfeed/is-drinking-cold-water-bad-for-health-3521/post
- Rupavate, S. (2017). 10 facts about seasonal cold and cough. The Health Site. Retrieved 10 April 2017, from http://www.thehealthsite.com/diseases-conditions/10-facts-about-seasonal-cold-and-cough-sh214/
- Upper Respiratory Infection (URI or Common Cold). (2017). Stanford Childrens Health. Retrieved 10 April 2017, from http://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=upper-respiratory-infection-uri-or-common-cold-90-P02966
