Dairy Sensitivity Survival Guide

My breast-fed daugh­ter was extremely sen­si­tive to dairy as an infant. It pre­sented at around 6 weeks — in the mid­dle of our cross-country move — as extreme fussi­ness and obvi­ous tummy pain. It finally went away, for the most part, within a week or two once I com­pletely cut dairy out of my diet. This meant read­ing labels and watch­ing not just for milk, but also for milk pro­teins. Since then I have come across many moms more savvy than I was at the time ask­ing for help­ing in liv­ing dairy-free. In response I have typed up a cryp­tic ram­ble on how I sur­vived. I am shar­ing our expe­ri­ence here, but it is up to you and the experts in your babies’ lives to decide if you need to cut dairy out of your diet.

I was milk-free for eight months while nurs­ing then slowly added milk prod­ucts back to my own diet. By about 15 months my lit­tle one started on occa­sional milk prod­ucts. By two she was a cham­pion cow milk drinker. The dairy-free diet was pretty easy once we got used to it, and was totally worth it for us. My lit­tle one went from a gassy, col­icky, unhappy crea­ture (with a very cranky mom) to a sweet lit­tle baby (with a much hap­pier mom) in a mat­ter of weeks.

Based on my own unsci­en­tific research — lots of read­ing and talk­ing to folks — it is my (com­pletely unpro­fes­sional) under­stand­ing that dairy sen­si­tiv­i­ties are often mis­di­ag­nosed as reflux and unnec­es­sar­ily med­icated. At my own pediatrician’s office every doc­tor I saw gave me dif­fer­ent advice. Much of it was con­flict­ing, and one doc­tor even sug­gested that I stop breast­feed­ing and use the really expen­sive for­mula made for kids with dairy issues. I never got a clear pro­fes­sional diag­no­sis, but I know the changes I saw in my baby.

Tricks for dairy-free living

• Read labels. Even things like bread, instant oat­meal, frozen meat­balls and cereal bars often have milk pro­tein hid­den in there, and we found that if we let any dairy sneak in we did not see the results.
• You need to get fat from other places. In my case, and prob­a­bly in a toddler’s case a lot of every day fat comes from milk prod­ucts. I needed to add in lots of nuts (cashews, cashew but­ter, almond but­ter, sun­flower but­ter are alter­na­tive to peanut but­ter) and olive oil to make up for lost fat & pro­tein and avoid cravings.
• It is harder to stick to it when there’s “reg­u­lar” food around. I put my whole fam­ily on a no or low dairy diet along with us.
• Bring your own food on any outing.
• Go to a “crunchy” web­site and look up vegan recipes. You can always add the meat back in.

Staples and prod­ucts we relied on (and where we found them)

• Soy milk – The Kirkland brand at Costco is pretty good & most lit­tle kids love it. Mine like it too much so I water it down. It also comes in lit­tle sin­gle boxes at Trader Joes. If you have con­cerns about too much soy con­sider oat milk, hazel­nut milk, almond milk, or rice milk.
• Fake cheese – Most cheese sub­sti­tutes suck when you first cut cheese out of your diet but you get used to them. We liked the Trader Joe’s selec­tion best because they had both shred­ded and sin­gles which were easy to manage.
• Soy yogurt – Target has the “silk brand” and the vanilla fla­vor is so sweet is tastes like pud­ding. Trader Joe’s car­ries their own brand, and it has a re-useable lid (silk just has a foil lid). If you like the big con­tain­ers, you need to go all the way to Whole Foods.
• Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese – This is car­ried by the health food store in mar­ket sta­tion, Giant, Wegmans (I think) and Trader Joe’s. Watch out though — it is like 100% evil par­tially hydro­genated oils.
• Tofu (as ricotta sub­sti­tute) – We used the food proces­sor to blend tofu, sun-dried toma­toes, olives, and olive oil for a yummy vegan lasagna fill­ing. We never stopped mak­ing lasagna this way. It is really good.
• Costco Potstickers – A lot of pre­pared food has milk prod­ucts in it, but at Costco you can get Potstickers in the freezer sec­tion that are dairy free. Trader Joe’s has lots of dairy free stuff, and great labels.
• Veggie Booty – They’re like green chee­tos. For Goodness Sake, the health food store in Market Station, has it.
• Coconut milk – It’s a good sub­sti­tute for mak­ing things like cream of tomato soup.
• Vegan cook­ies – Both the health food stores in Leesburg have them
• Trader Joe’s Cats Cookies
• Tofutti Cuties — They’re like ice cream sandwiches
• Homemade smoothie pop­si­cles — Just pour smoothie into pop­si­cle molds and eat them instead of ice cream
• Dried fruit

Eating out is hard, but a lot of Asian food is dairy-free. Thai, Chinese, and Japanese restau­rants are good places to eat out. We also tried and enjoyed Z-pizza in Leesburg after hear­ing that they can make your pizza with soy cheese on request.

Further Resources

• Kellymom
• La Leche League
• Loudoun Allergy Network — I blogged about it here

P.S. I was always rav­en­ous while nurs­ing and snacked a lot back then. I also craved junk food of all kinds while nurs­ing, hence all the snack/ junk food on my list 

Tagged as: dairy sensitivity, dairy-free