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Why is this happening? (high lipase)

CadieKCadieK member
in Breastfeeding

Sometimes my son refuses a bottle of expressed breast milk. 

I have tasted this milk and it does taste bitter, or sort of soapy/metallic.  I have read that this is a symptom of high lipase.

Ok well, fine.. but he is very inconsistent.  He will go weeks without refusing a bottle.  I will taste milk that has been stored for 24-78 hours in the fridge and it tastes just fine.  But everytime I taste the milk he rejects it does taste bad.  It doesnt smell bad, it just tastes bad, not awful, just not good.

So, maybe its something I am eating, right?

He has never refused to nurse, or responded to the milk the way he does when he refuses a bottle (gagging, clenching his mouth, spitting it out).

I asked a local LC about it.  She seemed to think that if it was high lipase he would refuse every bottle and that he would have done that from the begging.  She did not have any other suggestions.

The cure for high lipase is to scaled the milk, which kills some of the anti-infective properties.  Also, I work full time and spend an hour a day pumping at the office.  Its not like I can bring a hot plate to my cubicle to scaled the milk after every pumping session.

This is stressing me out.  I want to figure out why this is happening.  Any ideas or thoughts are welcome. 

TIA

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Re: Why is this happening? (high lipase)

  • cindyhowcindyhow

    I scald my milk when I get home and that works out fine (about 5-10 hours after expressing it).  I have tried to figure out why I have high lipase and haven't found an answer.  DD will refuse the milk after about 15 hours, so it's quite fast for me.  I just scald it in one batch and then I don't have to worry about her refusing it.

    Any chance the milk he rejects is from the freezer? It will def taste off if it's been frozen and you have a lipase issue.   

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  • CadieKCadieK member

    Cindy thanks for your response!  Do you know if your EBM was always bad?  I know for certain that the majority of my EBM is not affected with a bad taste.  It just seems to me that if I were having high lipase issues the problem would be more consistent.


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  • cindyhowcindyhow

    Hi Cadie,

    My milk gets the soapy/metallic taste about 12-15 hours, so it's not 'bad' but DD doesn't like the taste.  We figured this out right before I went back to work and were offering bottles a day later that I had expressed in the AM the day before.  She'll drink it fine when it's freshly expressed/within several hours. 

    I did the taste test method to narrow it down and then just scald every day when I get home since sending bottles the next day without scalding won't work for me.

    Maybe it has something to do with the time of day you express it/amount of fat at that time (reading AmyG's response)?  

    I also read somewhere about flax but I can't remember where I read that. I tried skipping my PNV (Rainbow light) to see if that was affecting it,but that was no change.  

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  • CadieKCadieK member

    Thanks for this info ladies.  I have done some research on the LLL website and got a pretty good email from a medela rep.  I am going to do the taste test and go from there.

     

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