Published on August 24, 2016
August 24, 2016
If you know that most women of childbearing age are vitamin D deficient, it starts to make sense that they wouldn’t have the vitamin D available to pass on in their breast milk.
Is it really that simple – if you give women enough vitamin D will they pass it on to the baby?
Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) tackled this question with the hypothesis that if a breastfeeding mom receives much more than the standard 400 IU/day of vitamin D, she will be able to pass on an adequate amount of vitamin D to her infant. After a double-blind randomized controlled trial they found that a daily vitamin D supplement of 6400 IU did indeed allow the mothers to pass enough vitamin D through breast milk so that their babies did not need a vitamin D supplement! The average 25(OH)D level of the women who received 6400 IU/day was about 60 ng/ml. The infants nutured this way had the equivalent of the 400 IU/day that is currently recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.