Blog4: You Don’t Need Milk to Make Milk

If you became a mother recently and you think drinking lots of milk helps you produce good quality of milk, this is for you: you don’t need milk to make milk. What you eat in general contributes to the functioning of your mammary glands and allows you to breastfeed your baby.

To make milk you need protein, sugar and water. So, whether you eat spinach, eggs, meat, nuts or anything else, they are all broken down inside your body. Your body extracts what it needs from the food you eat to make milk. If you see a correlation between drinking and making milk, it is only because of the lactose and protein in milk. It’s not the milk itself that makes milk.

There are three ways to produce good, nutrient-rich milk. First, you need to have a diet rich in protein (pulses and sprouts, paneer, milk, meat and curd) which will enhance both milk production and quality. Second, you need to drink enough water. Water is a crucial element of lactation; it’s so important that nursing mothers need to drink two glasses of water with every feed (the less water they drink, the less their flow of milk). And finally, small snacks between main meals help produce enough calories for you to produce good quality milk for your baby.