Doing the Elimination Diet with a newborn baby (and a toddler) while breastfeeding/nursing felt daunting at first, but ended up giving us all the answers to baby's eczema triggers and food intolerance symptoms.
Experiencing food intolerance symptoms
My Elimination Diet experience started in January 2021 after my newborn became very upset just after Christmas. He was five weeks old and had become constantly grizzly, gassy and burpy in the days right after Christmas. His little bottom was red and raw and his bowel movements were frequent, green, mucousy and stringy. He was also waking multiple times through the night and wasn’t resettling after a (breast) feed.
I thought it could be a reaction to the increased dairy I’d been consuming thanks to Christmas indulgence, so I cut this out – and sure enough, his mood and ability to sleep improved.
However, his poo still didn’t seem right. I was visiting a lactation consultant in mid January and she saw his poo during a nappy change and politely remarked that it wasn’t normal. She recommended continuing to cut out dairy, as well as gluten (wheat), nuts and eggs for three weeks to see if it made a difference.
Beginning the Elimination Diet
With an apprehensive deep breath I agreed and wondered what on earth I was going to eat! “Air and water,” my lactation consultant joked.
I did some recipe research at home and went and did a big supermarket shop, spending a fortune on fancy alternatives like 'egg replacer'. My husband agreed to do it with me* to see if it resolved any of his gut issues, though we continued our 22-month old daughter on her normal diet.
After three weeks I was disappointed to report that there was no change. “Try cutting out soy too,” I was told. Within 36 hours I could see an improvement with his nappy becoming normal.
The Elimination Diet and Eczema My baby was also an eczema baby, so now that his bowel movements were normalising, I was interested to see whether his eczema would improve too. Although I had read that it was rare for food to cause eczema (but that it was common for people with eczema to also have food allergies), I was determined to find the trigger for the red, itchy rash.
Reintroducing allergens on the Elimination Diet After three weeks on the full Elimination Diet, and a noticeable improvement in my baby's temperament and nappy, I decided to start re-introducing an allergen back into my diet. I used a 'Reintroduction Ladder' approach, starting with a small amount of the allergen (in a cooked food), and slowly working 'up' the ladder to a food with more of the allergen present (and uncooked if appropriate). For example, for eggs you might start with half a biscuit (cookie) that has one egg in the entire batch of biscuits and slowly work your way to chocolate mousse, which contains raw egg.
The first allergen I reintroduced was wheat/gluten, and this was fine. I opted for gluten as my first allergen as I thought it would open up access to the most foods for us, as opposed to nuts or soy.
Next I tried nuts, beginning with a cashew, aiming to work my way up to a handful. However, my baby came down with a cold/virus and a rash as part of this cold so I felt that I couldn't 100% tell which was the cold and which was a reaction so I aborted that reintroduction and gave myself some more time on the Elimination Diet with gluten.
The virus rash that came up at the same time we reintroduced nuts
Around this time, my baby was nearing six months so I started him on solids too (pumpkin and avocado for his first foods). Though for reintroduction of allergens, I stuck to reintroducing foods only in my diet first (getting to baby through breast milk) before I gave him the foods. Thankfully he handled gluten directly as a solid himself.
My next choice was eggs and this seemed to go ok until he had scrambled eggs. However, the first time he had a reaction I thought it was a bad eczema flare up. The second time he had a reaction, I realised it was another rash on top of the eczema.
The rash all over baby's body that came up within half an hour of him eating scrambled eggs
So we were back to 'no nuts, dairy, soy or egg' for a while before I attempted nuts again (still just me, so only via breast milk for baby). And this time... another virus and another virus rash... this time I took him to the Doctor to confirm that it was definitely a virus, and he did.
So another few weeks went by before I decided to see if soy could be handled... thankfully it seemed to all go smoothly!
I then went back to nuts, and would you believe, another virus! I was thinking 'surely it's more than just a coincidence! But maybe it's just the bugs his older sister is bringing home from day care...'
I gave it some time and then tried again, going through the ladder... And finally... no virus! No rash! Hallelujah!
So now we were 'just' egg and dairy free. Baby was one year old and starting day care at that stage. It was at this time that I started putting my favourite recipes together to give the teachers for their baking, that didn't require lots of fancy, expensive ingredients (now available as an eBook: Allergen-Free Recipes for Babies, Toddlers and Breastfeeding Mothers).
A few months prior to this, I accidentally ate a single bite of a cheese scone (right at the start of a long road trip), then breast fed around three hours later. The poonami explosion that occurred an hour later (which I had to clean with baby in the passenger seat while I stood in the pouring rain) confirmed that baby was still highly sensitive to dairy.
So next I decided to try eggs again, and... success! No red rash this time. Time had been the cure.
Now we were just dairy free. When baby was 14 months, our breastfeeding journey came to an end and I gave him soy formula. After a few weeks of this, I realised he hadn't had a solid poo the entire time, so I switched the formula for oat milk and there was an instant improvement. This was not a linear journey.
Now he is 22 months and is still highly sensitive to dairy however, he isn't upset at all by it. Despite it going straight through him within half an hour, he remains as happy as Larry, so I am not super strict and allow a small amount every now and then or when other people are preparing foods (just not ahead of a road trip!)
*My husband's Elimination Diet lasted 3 weeks, caving because of a cake at a friend's birthday party.
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