Transcript: Tips to Handle Fussy Eaters and Allergy to Cow Milk

This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called Tips to Handle Fussy Eaters and Allergy to Cow Milk and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.

Helen Thompson: As a first time mum, coping with infant feeding problems, identifying allergies, and finding ways to deal with fussy eaters often feels like a full-time occupation, doesn’t it? It’s the last thing you need on top of the other stresses you have to deal with daily as a new parent. I’ve wanted to chat with someone such as a pediatric dietician for some time and was delighted to recently meet Judith Lynn.

Judith lives in Northern Ireland and has a background in the British health system and has tons of experience and expertise, including 10 years as a pediatric dietitian. I really enjoyed chatting with her and she’s got a great wealth of knowledge and in this episode you’ll hear us talking about the psychology behind fussy eating and the reasons it may occur, identifying where there is an allergy to cow’s milk and what are the alternatives and how to start introducing them to solids when they are ready and so, so much more.

Hi Judith and welcome to First Time Mum’s Chat. I’m delighted to have you here because I’ve never had a children’s dietitian on my podcast before and I’m looking forward to finding out all about lots of different topics in regards to children’s eating. So tell me a little bit about yourself and where you’re from and how you got involved with what you do.

Judith Lynn: Absolutely. Well, thanks very much for inviting me to come on Helen. My name is Judith Lynn. I’m a pediatric or children’s dietician and I’ve worked as a dietician for about 20 years and specialized in children over the last 10. I’m from Northern Ireland and I trained as a dietician in Scotland and yeah, and I’ve worked sort of all over the UK. So I worked for the NHS for about 18 years or so, and then I decided to go into private practice and that’s what I’m doing now, simply because I have a young family, I was sick of the whole commute and I just kind of wanted to free up my own time and sort of be in control of my own schedule, and it’s the best decision I’ve ever done. So yeah, I see any child really with any nutritional problems, but I specialize mostly in allergies and babies, specifically cow’s milk allergy or infant feeding problems like colic or reflux, and a lot of fussy eaters.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, fussy eaters is a huge problem with kids and from my experience as a childcare worker and baby massage instructor, I think it’s a lot to do with how parents encourage their children to eat, that if they don’t like something, they’ll just give them something else and give them something else until they eat it and that’s not a very healthy approach to fussy eating.

Judith Lynn: No and there’s a lot of psychology around fussy eating. A lot of psychology to do with body language, like the language you’re using around children, the environment in which the children eat, has an awful lot to do with it and putting an awful lot of pressure on children as well to eat is not necessarily conducive of a healthy environment but I think there’s a lot of elements, moving parts involved with fussy eaters. Sometimes children are fussy eaters for a genuine reason. Maybe they just didn’t have a really good weaning experience, maybe they had a really bad choking episode, maybe they had a really bad teething episode where they got all their teeth in one go, maybe they’re children who’ve had allergies or reflux or maybe have had an allergic reaction.

Even as a baby, they remember that, and they can associate food with causing them pain, they can be quite fearful of trying new things. That can be a problem too. But you know what, 50% of all toddlers are gonna be fussy and sometimes it’s just a developmental thing and you just have to ride it out.

Helen Thompson: Well, they’re just learning , tasting new things, and they may not like the taste.

Judith Lynn: Absolutely and there’s loads of things that we as adults will eat now that we didn’t as a child and sometimes it’s just being mindful that we’ve had years of experience of trying foods and acquiring a taste for foods and children just haven’t. Sometimes it’s just, maybe giving them age appropriate foods. Some children will take to lots of different flavors really well, other children won’t. A lot of children just like plain foods and it’s maybe just figuring out what your child likes best and working from there onwards, yeah.

Helen Thompson: You mentioned earlier about allergies and babies. Now, I’m talking from the baby massage point of view and the childcare point of view. I know that nuts and milk and all that are having allergies and I know from working in childcare centers that we as adults, when we’re working, we’re not allowed to eat things like milk products or nuts. So what from a children’s dietician point of view do you come up with the allergies? I mean, are those ones I’ve mentioned common, are there any other ones out there that may not be as common to a mom that might not know?

Judith Lynn: So the majority of allergies that I will see in a baby is cow’s milk allergy and it probably seems quite common, but actually it really only is in 3-5% of babies and there’s two different types of allergies that we see and this and there’s IgE mediated allergy, which is the immediate allergy that you maybe would know if a child was to have an allergic reaction to something. The IgE mediated is the immediate flare that can turn into an anaphylactic reaction and then there’s non IgE.

So non IgE is more a delayed response. You tend to see it more in the gut. So you would see, diarrhea, constipation, really bad colicky windy type symptoms, reflux, and you might see it on their skin as well. Now there’s a confusion between, the non IgE allergy symptoms are very like what we might describe an intolerance actually rather an allergy, but it actually is an allergy because it involves the immune system. It just means that the immune system has a delayed response to the allergen so that the symptoms are delayed and actually the majority of cow’s milk allergy is a non IgE mediator type, so it’s quite difficult to diagnose sometimes because the symptoms are so similar to other things a baby might be having. So, colic or maybe infant feeding issues where they might be quite windy. Some babies do get loose stools, some babies are quite unsettled initially in their early stages.

If you think about it, a baby’s little gut is coming out sterile when they’re born and it has to develop over the coming months and years. And we now realize in research, and this is more up and coming is that the gut has a big influence on our immune system and the gut microbiome has a big influence on our immune system. So as a gut microbiome builds, meaning that’s just the gut bacteria building in the gut, baby’s immune system starts to build and their digestive system starts to build, and they’re able to digest and break down the proteins and milk and the starches and as a bacteria starts to build in the baby’s gut, that bacteria produces gas. So the gas can be what maybe causes the pain in baby sometimes. So you tend to find colicky type symptoms resolve around about three, four month mark. However, if those symptoms are not resolving and they’re paired with other symptoms like really bad reflux, really profused diarrhea or really chronic constipation, and a very, very unsettled baby, that is all day long rather than maybe just a few hours in the day, then we have to think, this is not normal, is there something else going on?

Helen Thompson: I know when we spoke, you mentioned to me that formula milk, formula powder had cow’s milk in it and I remember being a bit surprised, thinking to myself, well, I didn’t realize that, I always think of milk allergies as when your baby’s being breastfed because if the mom, if they’re drinking milk or eating cheese or anything like that, that’s all to do with dairy but when you said that to me, I was a bit surprised. So if a baby has got that allergy, allergy to dairy, can you give them like goat’s milk or can you get a goats milk formula?

Judith Lynn: So yes, that’s right. Formula milk, like the standard ones that you would buy in the shop, they are made from skim milk powder. So they’re made from cows milk dried powder, and they’re manipulated to make them more like breast milk. But you are never gonna get a cow’s milk to be like breast milk ever, because the proteins are so different. But they try their best, you know, and then they add the vitamins and minerals in there, the multi-vitamins and minerals. So what we tend to find is that actually the cows milk allergies tend to be more in the bottle fed babies, but that does not mean that we don’t see it in breast fed babies, we do. But if a breast fed baby is reacting to something and we’re suspecting it’s cow’s milk that the mom was eating in her diet, they’re likely to be very, very sensitive to the milk because whatever you eat as a mom, those nutrients is turned into milk for your baby. So the proteins that you eat through dairy, and then goes into breast milk, those proteins are already quite broken down and they’re really quite filtered and whenever you break down the proteins, they’re better digested, they’re better tolerated, and you’re less likely to get this allergic reaction.

So actually you see it less in breast fed babies but if a breast fed baby has an allergy to cow’s milk or to anything else, then they’re likely to be quite sensitive to that allergen.

So if you are bottle feeding your baby and you suspect your baby is having cow’s milk allergy, then you need to get a different formula altogether.

So a formula that’s called extensively hydrolyzed formula and these formulas are prescribable and what they’ve done is they’ve broken the proteins down. So if you can imagine a protein, if you were to look at it through your microscope, like a paper chain, and that paper chain could be any length and then what you do is you chop that paper chain down into two to three individual links. That’s what they do with these extensively hydrolyzed formulas. When they break those proteins down into small, small link chains called peptides, the baby is able to process and digest those proteins better which lowers the risk of this reaction or these symptoms appearing. Some babies are still sensitive to that, then they would have to go on to what we call an amino acid based formula and that’s just where the proteins are completely broken down into the individual single links. So there is things that we can do and there’s treatment plans that we can advise for these babies.

Helen Thompson: So just a question about what you were saying about the formulas. If you just decided as a mom that you didn’t want to give your baby a powdered formula, it had the milk in it, is it from a nutritional point of view okay to say, right, well, I’d like to go down the route of goat’s milk, or what you were talking about? Is that okay as a nutrition point of view or is it not giving the baby enough nutrients?

Judith Lynn: So yeah, that’s a really good point. So, for cow’s milk allergy, and I’ll talk about the normal babies now in a minute, but for cow’s milk allergy, we don’t advise any other mammals milk, apart from our own, such as sheep or goats milk, because the protein structure is very, very similar to cow’s milk. So 90% or more of babies with a cow’s milk allergy will react to goats milk and maybe slightly less to shape’s milk. So what you might find an initial improvement if you switch over to some of these milks because the structures of the milks are slightly different, the starches are slightly different, and you might see an initial improvement, but then the symptoms tend to come back. And that can happen too if you switch over to a lactose free milk. A lactose free milk is removing the sugar from the milk rather than the proteins and you might find an initial improvement because your baby’s got a little rest because they’re not having to break down the lactose, but then symptoms tend to come back.

So, no, we don’t advise any other mammal milks for cow’s milk allergy babies but in terms of a normal baby, you can get goats based infant formula. It’s on the market. They’re not as popular, but you could give your baby a goats milk formula if you wished from birth.

Helen Thompson: If they had an allergy to the goats milk you are saying 99% of the time they might actually have an allergy to dairy as well?

Judith Lynn: Absolutely, yes, you can get soya based formulas. We don’t generally advise soya formulas until six months of age for babies, simply because there’s natural estrogens and we don’t advise it just until the baby’s a little bit older. Although they can be marketed from birth, but health professionals would say like, leave it until six months before you would try a soya based formula.

Helen Thompson: Cause they’ve gotta get their protein too.

Judith Lynn: Well, again, the soya based formulas, as with any infant formula that’s marketed for a baby, is going to be fortified with the nutrients that it needs. It’s gonna have the right amount of protein in it, but as you say, the proteins are more so based rather than, cow’s milk based and actually soya too, that’s really worth my mentioning is, there is a cross-reactivity with soya and cows milk. You tend to find that a percentage, it could be 40 to 60% of babies with the cow’s milk will also have an allergy to soya too. Yeah, I know cuz again, the proteins are similar. There’s some amino acids that are similar in cow’s milk, that there is in the soya. So yeah, there’s a lot of different factors to consider when looking at a baby who is unsettled. You know, it’s to consider does this baby have an allergy and if they don’t have an allergy, what else could be possibly going on with them? Yeah, that’s making them so unsettled.

Helen Thompson: Yeah you mentioned colic, from my point of view, I always recommend doing baby massage with colic, and if that doesn’t work we’ll then go and see somebody like you or a dietician, but nine times out of 10, I’ve observed that if a mother does baby massage, massaging the stomach, following the bowel, clockwise direction, going through certain techniques, it does ease the colic, it does release that colic if it’s done enough times it does release it. So it could be all those allergens or whatever it is you were talking about are being released and pushed out of the bowel.

Judith Lynn: Yes, absolutely. The body wants to push it out and colic is something a lot of babies get, and there’s not that much research done into it. I think there really needs to be more but what we do know is that it goes as quickly as it appears sometimes.

Helen Thompson: And for a mother, I think when their baby is suffering from colic, they just want a quick relief because it’s so frustrating for them. Their babies are just crying constantly and constantly cuz they’re in so much pain.

Judith Lynn: Totally and I know my little boy whenever he was a baby, he had colic, and the baby massage worked brilliantly and that’s one technique. There’s other things that you can do, there’s a little probiotic, there’s one called BioGaia that’s on the market. It’s like little baby drops, but there’s lots of little probiotics suitable for babies, and they usually come in little drops. Definitely if you’ve got a colicky baby, I would suggest giving it a go. They’re generally known to be very safe and they can be quite effective. They supposedly just give that gut a little helping hand and then if you’re a mom that’s breastfeeding. Again, there’s no scientific evidence to prove this or disprove it but it stands to reason that breast milk is made from what you eat yourself. So it is maybe being mindful of what you’re actually eating and think back, give a little diary of what you’ve eaten. Is there any particular times where you’ve noticed your baby more settled with something that you’ve eaten?

I mean, gas producing foods like brassicas and quite high fiber foods, lots of onions and garlic and spices sometimes, can cause wind and just indigestion in our own bodies and that sometimes can pass through into the milk. I wouldn’t suggest stopping them. I would just say, be mindful, you know, maybe don’t have garlic for lunch and dinner and then lunch the next day and lots and lots of consecutive meals in a row, if you know what I mean?

Helen Thompson: So, I’m thinking about baby led weaning. I would always give a child a few things. I wouldn’t give them too many things on a plate at once. I’d probably give them maybe a bit of cooked broccoli and maybe a bit of carrot or something. Pureed food is okay if it’s naturally pureed.

Judith Lynn: Absolutely, totally agree. I am a big fan of baby led weaning, but I also like purees too and there’s pros and cons of each and what we know is that babies tend to get more calories and more of the food groups overall with the puree, because you mix it all in together, you’re mixing some carbohydrates, protein, fats, and vegetables all in together, than a baby that’s baby led so they might choose one food group over another and eat more of one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad thing. I mean baby lead weaning is excellent for development of coordination, chewing and fine motor skills. It’s excellent for, texture, them getting used to texture, them getting used to not having the same maybe as aversion to certain textures and moving forward with those textures. But at the same time, if you are making all your purees yourself at home, those purees are a lot thicker, they’ve got a lot more texture in them, you tend to move through the textures quicker as your baby starts to develop and you start to notice them eating with their fingers a lot more, you’ll start to put more lumps into their purees but we do know that babies that are raised more on the shop bought type pouches and jars, which are very smooth texture, even the ones for a seven month plus are still a lot smoother than the ones that you would make at home and we know that those babies solely winged onto those and given those foods solely are a lot fussier, are difficult to move onto family meals, are a lot more difficult to get them to eat more variety because they’ve got very used to this very specific taste.

And they’re sugary and they tend to mix fruits with vegetables and what we now recommend is more a vegetables first approach. So when you’re first weaning your baby, whether you go down the baby, lead rich, whether you do the combination of the two or whether you want to stick with the purees, try for at least for the first two to three weeks and offer really vegetables first before you would move on to give maybe some fruit because that has thought to increase a vegetable liking later on into the toddler years and more a taste for the more savory flavor rather than the sweet. Babies will always naturally be drawn to the sweet fizz because breast milk and formula milk is naturally sweet. So you want to introduce more savory flavors in the weaning stages and get them used to that and then you can start to introduce all the other flavors and from six months you can start to introduce sort of meats and proteins and things into their diet as well.

Helen Thompson: So, I know some moms give their babies a form of porridge. I was just trying to think what the name of it is, it’s not porridge.

Judith Lynn: Like a baby rice or oatmeal.

Helen Thompson: Is that a good thing to give them to begin with when you first start or should you just give them, when I say broccoli, I’m not saying you give them a huge chunk of broccoli I’m not saying that at all, but you might just cut a bit off and give them that. Or should you start by giving them that, or just automatically go right in there and give them a bit of broccoli or give them a bit of carrot or whatever it is?

Judith Lynn: So first foods, first weaning foods, if you’re weaning your baby around five months. Say, say slightly before six months, you decide your baby’s ready and you want to start introducing solids. I would recommend you probably would start more with purees, absolutely cereals. So all suitable first foods are cereals like baby rice, porridge and then all the vegetables and you could go for vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, carrots, parsnips. And then you could mix in a little bit of butternut squash, puree and with your baby rice or some of the cereals if you wanted and what we generally tended to do before, is we maybe would’ve mixed in some banana into the baby rice or apple puree into the baby rice to sweeten it but I would suggest refraining from doing that and maybe just giving the baby rice the way it is, mix in with the baby’s normal milk, or mixing in a little bit of butternut squash or carrot puree or something in there and carrots and butternut squash are actually naturally quite sweet, but they’re not too sweet. They wouldn’t have as much sugar in them.

Helen Thompson: What about giving them the puree? You know what you’re talking about, but instead of mashing the pumpkin or whatever you’re gonna mash, just cook it so it’s really soft so it’s in a chunk but it’s really, really soft, so they’ve got the option of, okay, I’m gonna have this, or I’m gonna pick this up and I’m gonna squeeze it and I’m gonna throw it at mom, play with, I’m gonna throw it, or I’m gonna do whatever I’m gonna do with it. It might get to my mouth, but if it doesn’t, at least I’ve had that experience of the texture.

Judith Lynn: And then the next time they’ll eat everything. Completely agree. I think that definitely you can give them, you can get spoon stuff into them at the same time they have their own finger foods in front of them to play with, to feel, to smell, to initiate those senses, to create awareness and understanding of what food is and how it is in its whole form and then over time they’ll start to lift that and they’ll start to eat it. And surprisingly, they do not need one tooth in their head to be able to eat things and chew it and my son didn’t have any teeth until he was nine months and he was eating, little bits of chicken and potato whole and little bits of broccoli and obviously you want to have it soft, so that it’s okay for the gums but yeah they are very resilient. Children are very resilient and babies, they grow and thrive so quickly and their little cognition and everything develops so quickly that they are a quite able to cope with finger foods and chew it and bite it and of course, they copy you as well. They go by repetition and copying and it’s all a learning curve. You want to really offer these textures because it really does help them later in life.

You may have a toddler that goes through a fussy stage, and most of them do but they will ride out, they’re used to eating with their hands, they’re used to self feeding, they’re used to this because you have offered it to them at the time of weaning, so it just makes them a better eater and a more varied eater and a more mindful eater as well.

Helen Thompson: And it gives them more of an opportunity to taste different things so that they’re more happy to taste different things.

Judith Lynn: Absolutely and you want to give them just your food as well. Don’t make them fancy, special baby meals. Just give them what you are having yourself because then they’ll get used to the way you cook, the flavors that you have in your family and that’s what they’re used to from the very, very start. So if you’re having a meat potato and vegetable dinner, you give them the meat, the potatoes and the vegetables. You might want not want to give them too much gravy cuz they’re stock in the gravy, but you can give them the meat juices, you could put a little bit of butter in there or you can just have little bits on their plate too that they can play with and they can experiment with and if you’re making a spaghetti bolognaise, again you would take theirs out before you’d maybe put a stock cube in or add salt to yours. And then you would just give them the mince, the bolognaise and some pasta.

Yeah and you can freeze, whatever your dinners are you’re making yourself, you can portion out for them and put them in the freezer so you’ve got it there. I know a lot of moms do worry about the choking. Make it small and remember babies have very, very acute instincts. So their instinct is to gag, and that’s exactly what you want. You want them gagging cuz when they gag they’re not gonna choke.

So you will get babies that when they first put some of these textures into their mouth, they’ll go, and it’ll be quite frightening, I understand I’ve been there, but just take a step back and let them do their thing. Let them clear their own airways and if they are not clearing their own airways, then that’s when you intervene, obviously but 99.9% of time that baby will clear their own airways, they’ll swallow down and they’ll open their mouth for more.

Helen Thompson: So how long should you wait? If they’re eating something, obviously if they’re gagging as a mother, you’ve just said you’ve been there, it’s hard.

Judith Lynn: It’s very hard.

Helen Thompson: How should you know whether you really need to intervene.

Judith Lynn: Yeah, so you will notice them clearing their airways pretty much straight away. So they’ll gag, gag and sort of almost cough up. But if they are gagging and that’s not coming up and they are struggling and you notice them struggling, then you have to lift them out of that high chair. Do not pat their back while they are in the high chair, you have to lift them out of the high chair and put their head down below their feet, so that gravity is gonna push that out. If you pat their back whilst they’re sitting upright, you’re gonna make that go down further. You have to lift them out, have to put their head down and you have to almost push from the bottom of their back up to their top of their neck, so that gravity is gonna pull it out.

Yeah, the weaning process is kind of fun, kind of nerve-wracking, but once you start and once you see how the baby enjoys food, it’s a really rewarding experience and then I suppose maybe we talk, talk a little bit about fussy eaters maybe about how to deal with that. I think sometimes as parents we like to be in control, we like to be in control of the food choices, we like to be in control of the meal times, we like to be in control of our babies and I think sometimes you realize when you have a baby or a toddler, you’re like, I’m no longer in control, this child’s in control and toddlers, you can start to see fussy eating start in the toddler phase around about 18 months to two years when they’re really wanting to start to assert their independence and this is totally normal and they want to be more in control of their own bodies and if you think about a child, children are growing very rapidly. They have quite high calorie requirements compared to us, but they’ve got tiny tummies, so it takes very little to fill your baby up. So babies and toddlers are very, very in tune with their appetite, and they literally will not eat if they’re not hungry, so sometimes if your baby is really refusing a meal, and you’re starting to notice a pattern that is every single day they will not eat lunch, or every single day they will not eat dinner, or every single day they’re not a great breakfast eater, really think about your timings of foods, snacks, and bottles and milk drinks because if, for example, your toddlers got up, you’ve given them a bottle of milk, then an hour later you’re giving them a breakfast. They really love their breakfast, they would eat a great big breakfast, then maybe an hour and a half later they’re having a snack and they go down for a nap and then they wake up at 12 o’clock or half 12, and they’re not eating their lunch. Well, let’s think about what their baby had. Like full bottle of milk, they had a great big breakfast and they had a snack.

They’ve probably had more than half their calorie requirements in the day already and it’s only 12 o’clock. That’s probably why they’re not eating, but we have this expectation they should be eating at breakfast, they should be eating at lunch, they should be eating at dinner, and they should be having snacks and they should be having these amount of bottles in the day or these amount of milk drinks in the day and you know, it doesn’t always work like that. Children will eat when they’re hungry and not eat when they’re full and also just like us adults, whenever they’re full, things don’t taste as nice. All of a sudden you lose an appetite for things and you don’t want to eat it.

Things don’t have the same flavor, the same appeal. So if you are offering this beautiful dinner and, it might have some new things on it that they maybe are not so familiar with, they are absolutely, definitely not gonna try those things if they are full, but they may try them if they are hungry. So you want to create an appetite in your child, be mindful how much you’re giving them at snack times, how much milk they’re drinking. Like milk is great, don’t get me wrong, it’s so nutritious and we all need to drink it, but toddlers only really need three portions of dairy a day to meet their calcium requirements and one portion is equivalent to about a 100 to 150 mils of milk or about 20 grams of cheese or a small pot of yogurt. Now if your baby is having maybe three glasses or cups or bottles of milk a day, plus yogurts, plus cheese in their diet, plus all the food, it stands to reason that they’re maybe getting filled up milk because milk is a liquid, but it’s also a food, so it’s gonna fill that tiny little tummy up really, really quickly and it’s got lots of protein and fats and carbohydrates in there, but it doesn’t have any fiber and it doesn’t have any iron so it’s going to affect the overall nutritional value of their whole day if they’re filling up on milk. So just be mindful of those things as well.

Other techniques allow your children to self feed. they like to be independent, they want to feed themselves. So go and buy yourself little toddler cutlery, knives and forks, crockery, fancy little plates with smiley faces on them, and let them get on with it. Give them the spoon, give them the fork. Let them have that independence and let themselves feed and another thing too is that eating together as a family is really great for development. They get to look what you eat and they get to watch their dad eat but when you’re sitting around the table as a family, the focus is not solely on them. The focus is on the family having a chat about your day and they get to listen and sometimes whenever your baby eats separately from you, you’re sitting down beside them and you’re feeding them, you are giving them so much focus, they can feel a bit overwhelmed and a bit intimidated and a bit kind of stop watching me, go away and leave me alone. You can imagine yourself as a person and somebody was sitting there watching you and feeding you, you would be like, get away from me and leave me alone and let me go on with it myself.

So the children have all those emotions and all those feelings we have. So you have to almost encourage this independence and allow them to feed and kind of give them the space to be able to feed themselves and eat what they want as well. So that’s some techniques for fussy eating, there’s loads more.

Helen Thompson: Well, thank you you’ve given us a lot of wonderful techniques there, and I really appreciate that. So if somebody wants to get in touch with you or find out more about what you do , where do they go to find that.

Judith Lynn: So you can go to my website LittleMonkeyNutrition.com and on the homepage, there’s quite a lot of really good information. I have a step by step guide to diagnose your baby with cow’s milk allergy. If you click on the cow’s milk allergy tab at the top, that’ll take you in, and the guide will be in there.

It’s very useful and it goes through the diagnosis, the symptoms, trying to identify your baby’s symptoms, eliminating milk from your diet, or changing over to a different formula for a period of about two to four weeks and then challenging, and that’s how we diagnose it and actually what that does even if during the challenge phase, the symptoms don’t come back and you’re not convinced that it’s an allergy. That gives you a lot of information, that says, right, okay, well this problem that my baby is having is not actually due to that allergy, what is it? Is it another infant feeding problem, is it a tongue tie, do I need to look at the way I’m feeding my baby in terms of bottle feeding or even breastfeeding, things like that.

And I do one-to-one appointments as well. So yeah, that’s me.

Helen Thompson: Well, thank you for that Judith, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I’ve actually learned so much, particularly about the allergies and how it all works so thank you so much for being a part of the podcast.

Judith Lynn: Not at all Helen, and thanks very much for inviting me to come along.

Helen Thompson: I hope you learnt plenty from Judith about identifying cow’s milk allergies and also how you can cope with fussy eating. I highly recommend checking out Judith’s website and her free step by step guide to diagnose your baby with cow’s milk allergy. Judith also has an amazing Baby and Toddler Nutrition Facebook group where you can gain access to live trainings, share recipes and get advice from her as well as other parents and I highly recommend checking out this community. I’ve included links to these and also Judith’s social media in the episode show notes which can be accessed at MyBabyMassage.net/podcast/092.