[dracon (OP)]

Conrad Berube asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Howdy Newton's Nude-ones!
  
I have a friend in the office here who is breast-feeding an infant.   She says that she can't eat dairy products because the milk proteins would pass from her digestive tract into her breast milk and cause an allergic reaction in her young son (who had been suffering from bloody stools prior to her altering her diet).  
  
This sounds a bit like Food Protein-Induced Enterocolitis Syndrome-- but my understanding is that FPIES is the result of infants being directly exposed to foods not to their residuals in breast milk.   Further, the idea that protein in a mothers diet could cross into breast milk contradicts my understanding of digestion and glandular secretion.   Although I can understand how other dietary components could find their way into breast milk and thus affect a babys digestion, aren't proteins too big to get into breast milk in the way my friend believes they do?
  
Conrad Berube

What do you think?

[wanhafizi]

I think it depends...

Does the baby allergic to the amino acid compounds in it or the "crude" protein itself?

...I think...

[thedoc]

Listen to the answer to this question on our podcast.