When To Drink Milk's Up Breastfeeding Tea
Our Milk’s Up breastfeeding tea can be drunk at any stage of motherhood, but there’s a sweet spot that we’d recommend…and it is actually when you’re pregnant!
In order to try to have a better chance of establishing milk supply easily, it is highly recommended to harvest colostrum at the end of your pregnancy. Doing this has been linked in research to help establish milk supply, and it also means you can freeze the colostrum and have some of the liquid gold in your freezer, to top your baby up with when they come home. If you’re wondering how to express milk, the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers has great instructions here.
And alongside this, you can drink our Milk’s Up breastfeeding tea, to keep your body hydrated and well nourished. It’s ingredients are natural galactagogues, which have been used for millennia to support milk supply. Small scale research shows that several of the key ingredients we use, do indeed increase milk supply and fat content of milk - fenugreek and fennel in particular.
Drinking up to 3 cups a day, along with hand expressing milk, can hopefully help prepare your body for when your baby arrives.
You can absolutely drink it after your baby arrives too, but as everyone’s bodies are different, and you may take a week or so to see results, it’s great to plan ahead and start when pregnant if you can.
We recommend talking to your midwife about when to start hand expressing milk, as some advise to wait until you’re full term, just in case the production of oxytocin induces labour. There’s no reason not to drink the tea earlier, but it isn’t really necessary until you’re expressing too. This is the key thing for increasing milk supply, and the tea is a great support.
For more information, my expert midwife have put together an article exploring colostrum harvesting, looking at how much to harvest and how to collect and store them - https://myexpertmidwife.com/
