If your baby doesn’t seem calm and restful after feeding, it could be an intolerance to cow’s milk protein – even if you’re nursing.
In babies as young as 3 to 5 weeks of age, cow’s milk protein intolerance can appear as increased fussiness, with your baby not napping or staying asleep for long. This intolerance might also show up as blood or mucous in the stool – either microscopic or obvious blood. Your pediatrician may have to test a stool sample for microscopic bits of blood, which signals that your baby is suffering from cow’s milk protein allergy or intolerance (CMPA).
CMPA doesn’t only affect babies who are fed formula. If you’re eating dairy and breastfeeding, this could cause reactions in your baby, too. Your baby might benefit from you doing dairy elimination. But speak to your child’s pediatrician before trying that.
How To Do a Dairy Elimination
To complete a dairy elimination, you need to remove foods with dairy from your diet if breastfeeding and from your child’s diet if formula fed. Eliminating dairy isn’t that simple because many products contain dairy. Check labels of foods in your home and when shopping. Milk or milk-containing items can be labeled as milk, cream, butter, whey, casein, lactose or milk powder. It’s in more products than you may realize, including:
- Crackers
- Some chip flavors coated in whey or other dairy products
- Gum can include milk proteins or lactose
- Many baked goods
- Dips and dressings
Many people ask if a dairy elimination needs to include yogurt, and since yogurt is a dairy containing product, this is typically initially removed from the diet. However, you can reintroduce yogurt at six months and see what happens. If your baby has a bad reaction, you can try again in six months to a year.
Thankfully, there are a lot of dairy substitutes and dairy-free products, including dairy-free and hypo-allergenic varieties of formula, which makes this diagnosis easier to manage.
Additional Symptoms of Lactose Intolerance
Sometimes babies don't have fussiness or discomfort, but cow’s milk protein intolerance can also be associated with other symptoms, including:
- Early onset eczema
- Asthmatic reactions
- Hives, a rash, wheezing or coughing
- Reflux
There are more severe reactions as well. One is food protein-induced proctocolitis, which can include severe vomiting. If your baby is throwing up much more than normal or has any of the above symptoms, it’s time to speak to your pediatrician about seeing a gastroenterologist.
What To Do After Ruling Out Dairy
If your baby still shows symptoms after a dairy elimination, you may want to talk to your doctor about removing other potentially offending foods. Dairy is the most common food triggering your baby’s reactions. After that, the next common offenders, are soy, wheat, eggs, fish/seafood and peanut/nuts.
If you complete an elimination of all these things and your baby is still suffering, it’s time to ask your pediatrician for a referral to a GI, who may need to perform an endoscopy on your baby.
Time Cures Many Cases of Dairy Intolerance
Just because your baby is suffering from a cow’s milk protein intolerance doesn’t mean they will deal with this issue their whole lives nor is it the same as lactose intolerance. It’s very common for kids to outgrow this intolerance with age.
- 50% of kids who have CMPA will outgrow by age 1
- 75% by age 3
- 90% by age 5
At your child’s first birthday, you can try reintroducing regular milk. Watch for signs of discomfort or fussiness. If your baby is fine, you can resume including dairy in your child’s diet.
Every year, the likelihood increases that your child will outgrow this allergy. Well-child visits with your pediatrician are a good time to discuss this. If you reintroduce dairy, monitor your child’s reactions to see if you can safely add dairy products back into their meals.
This content is not AI generated.
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