Should Breast-Feeding Women Really Drink Guinness?

Woman with beer — "Guinness is good for you" the slogan goes, but what about for breast-feeding moms?

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New mothers are commonly heaped with advice — some of it welcome, some not. But there's one rather unconventional piece of wisdom that stands out from the rest: For decades, women have been told they should drink Guinness — the dark, Irish beer — to boost their production of breast milk and nourish their newborns. To Guinness lovers, this might be a welcome nugget of advice. But does it stand up to scientific scrutiny?

One thing we do know is that the idea has roots deep in history, long before Guinness came along. In fact, humans have been touting the milk-boosting benefits of beer for centuries. As far back as 2000 B.C., records apparently show that the Sumerian people prescribed beer as an aid for breast-feeding. Along with many other foods — like anise, fenugreek (an herb) and oatmeal — beer developed a reputation as a "galactagogue," a food thought to stimulate lactation. Over the centuries, this became an established belief in traditions around the world.

In the early 1900s, the marketing campaign around Guinness, in particular, gave it a special identity as a "healthful" beverage. Because the beer initially was manufactured with a kind of yeast that gave it a high iron content, it was reportedly offered to blood donors back in the day, or to patients who had just undergone surgery in the hospital. This helped to solidify the drink's original slogan: "Guinness is good for you." Nursing mothers were then encouraged to imbibe this drink as a milk-boosting tonic, too.

"It's important to emphasize that the amount of research here is quite limited," she cautioned. But some studies have drawn a link between a polysaccharide, a type of carbohydrate present in barley hops, and an increase in prolactin, the hormone that aids the production of milk from breast tissue. These factors might explain why beer drinkers of the past sensed that the beverage had a beneficial effect on their capacity to produce milk.

But there's a caveat: Adding alcohol to this hoppy mixture obscures any potential benefit one might get from the barley. Gary Beauchamp and Julie Mennella, two biopsychologists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, carried out landmark research in the 1990s showing that when mothers consume alcohol and breast-feed, it seems to alter the flavor of their milk, causing infants to feed less over a certain period of time.

On the other hand, Haastrup believes that moderate alcohol consumption is less of a hindrance to milk production than it may appear at first. The letdown seems only to be delayed by alcohol, not entirely stopped, she said. Studies have found that babies nursing from mothers who've consumed an alcoholic drink will still feed as much over a 16-hour period as babies whose mothers haven't imbibed at all.

"As far as I can see, there isn't a problem here as long as you follow the general recommendations, only drink occasionally, and drink responsibility," she said. For instance, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that a nursing mother would be wise to wait for two hours after an alcoholic drink, before she feeds her infant again. And sure, the alcohol could trigger a temporary delay in milk production — but then, that might just be worth it for the chance to kick back with the occasional beer.

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Emma Bryce is a London-based freelance journalist who writes primarily about the environment, conservation and climate change. She has written for The Guardian, Wired Magazine, TED Ed, Anthropocene, China Dialogue, and Yale e360 among others, and has masters degree in science, health, and environmental reporting from New York University. Emma has been awarded reporting grants from the European Journalism Centre, and in 2016 received an International Reporting Project fellowship to attend the COP22 climate conference in Morocco.