Boozy Boobs

breastfeeding
parenting physiology
Published

November 26, 2025

Do you hear the tinkling jingle of AI generated bells? The festive season is nearly upon us, so I want to turn to a question I see posed a lot to parents:

Can you drink while breastfeeding?

I’ve heard a lot of responses to this question, including: “If you can find the baby, you can feed the baby”, and “If you can drive you can drink”, and “pump and dump and you’ll be fine” and “why would I risk my baby like that?”

Let’s start with ‘researcher position’, or, my own biases on the topic. I’m Scottish, and I love a drink. As I’ve discussed before on the blog, I also breastfed/feed my children. I am currently still a breastfeeding parent, although I suspect my journey with my youngest will end early next year. Both my children were also exclusively breastfed, shunning bottles entirely.

You may have seen scary findings reported suggesting that breastfeeding with alcohol in your system is associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome even when there was no alcohol consumed during pregnancy 1. Or have concerns that drinking excessively has been associated with harm being caused to young infants through accident and injury 2. Certainly, there is a very clear and convincing association between drinking while bed-sharing and infant loss of life through Sudden Infant Death Syndrome 3. If I can make one thing clear, is that you must be very, very sure not to drink and bed share. But these other concerns, are they such a problem? But I’m considerably less convinced by historic self-reports of alcohol consumption which is collapsed to a flat binary and conflated with socio-economic factors and related to non-contemporary Fetal Alcohol Syndrome scoring.

This 4 2013 study is, to my mind, a good review of the topic, and they, like me, are unconvinced by claims of direct harm to infants from nursing with moderate levels of alcohol. Mechanistically, breastmilk is created from blood, and due to the way alcohol is metabolised, the alcohol content of breastmilk very closely follows the alcohol content of the mother’s blood5. This is, of course, a complicated topic. Drinking excessively has been shown to lead to infant harm, but this is more likely to be errors from the parent as opposed to alcohol poisoning. Even quite heavy drinking during breastfeeding, drinking between 3 and 5 standard drinks per session were not associated with adverse infant outcomes 6 in standardised tests, when controlling for socio-economic factors. As Haastrup et al point out:

Theoretically, if a mother of 70 kg were to drink four standard drinks (of 12 g pure alcohol) at one occasion and then breastfeed her child at the time of the highest maternal alcohol concentration in blood, the child would be exposed to 1.37 g/L in the breast milk. If the child then were to drink 150 mL milk, the blood alcohol level of the child would be 0.049 g/L, or 0.005% (about 1/10 the limit for driving legally in most European countries). The child is consequently exposed to only a fraction of the amount of alcohol ingested by the mother. 7

However, there are some impacts of alcohol on breastmilk production, mainly the finding that alcohol slightly reduces milk production 8,9. As nursing parents often use behavioural adjustments to minimise the impact of breastfeeding, such drinking immediately during or after a feed to give their bodies time to metabolise the alcohol out 10, this may not always actually impact the infant as much as it does in studies where we see changes in manual expression.

We do see, at a population level, some interesting relationships between breastfeeding parents who drink and shorter overall breastfeeding duration 11, however moderate regular alcohol drinkers tend to be older, well educated people who also tend to breastfeed for longer 12! Whereas alcohol use in pregnancy is more associated with social deprivation and trauma 13. These conflicting reports illustrate the complicated nature of making declarative statements about parenting issues, and, indeed, the weakness of any relationship between nursing and alcohol imbibing.

I personally am happy to drink moderately (2-3 drinks per session) when breastfeeding. When my babies were very young, I would drink during a nursing session, as that is when the blood alcohol concentration is lower 14 and gives my body the maximum amount of time to metabolise the alcohol out before the next feed. As I regularly bedshare (topic of another post …) I also give myself a hard cut off before bed time where I am confident I will have metabolised all my alcohol before I go to sleep. I also found myself a lot less happy to drink when my babies were very small, sadly crushing my dreams of a healthy prosecco immediately post birth.

Hopefully that’s given you some food for thought and some places to explore further if you’re puzzling over whether you want to drink and nurse. And whatever you choose, have a very happy festive period, and well done for continuing breastfeeding!

Footnotes

  1. Philip A. May, Julie M. Hasken, Jason Blankenship, Anna-Susan Marais, Belinda Joubert, Marise Cloete, Marlene M. de Vries, Ronel Barnard, Isobel Botha, Sumien Roux, Cate Doms, J. Phillip Gossage, Wendy O. Kalberg, David Buckley, Luther K. Robinson, Colleen M. Adnams, Melanie A. Manning, Charles D.H. Parry, H.Eugene Hoyme, Barbara Tabachnick, Soraya Seedat,(2016) Breastfeeding and maternal alcohol use: Prevalence and effects on child outcomes and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Reproductive Toxicology, 63, 13-21 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.reprotox.2016.05.002.↩︎

  2. Anderson, P.O (2018) Alcohol use during breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Medicine 13, 5 https://doi.org/10.1089/bfm.2018.0053↩︎

  3. Blair P S, Sidebotham P, Evason-Coombe C, Edmonds M, Heckstall-Smith E M A, Fleming P et al. Hazardous cosleeping environments and risk factors amenable to change: case-control study of SIDS in south west England BMJ 2009; 339 :b3666 doi:10.1136/bmj.b3666↩︎

  4. Haastrup, M.B., Pottegård, A. and Damkier, P. (2014), Alcohol and Breastfeeding. Basic Clin Pharmacol Toxicol, 114: 168-173. https://doi.org/10.1111/bcpt.12149↩︎

  5. Anderson, P.O (2018) Alcohol use during breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Medicine 13, 5 https://doi.org/10.1089/bfm.2018.0053↩︎

  6. Wilson, J., Tay, R.Y., McCormack, C., Allsop, S., Najman, J., Burns, L., Olsson, C.A., Elliott, E., Jacobs, S., Mattick, R.P. and Hutchinson, D. (2017), Alcohol consumption by breastfeeding mothers: Frequency, correlates and infant outcomes. Drug and Alcohol Review, 36: 667-676. https://doi.org/10.1111/dar.12473↩︎

  7. Haastrup, M.B., Pottegård, A. and Damkier, P. (2014), Alcohol and Breastfeeding. Basic Clin Pharmacol Toxicol, 114: 168-173. https://doi.org/10.1111/bcpt.12149↩︎

  8. Anderson, P.O (2018) Alcohol use during breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Medicine 13, 5 https://doi.org/10.1089/bfm.2018.0053↩︎

  9. Haastrup, M.B., Pottegård, A. and Damkier, P. (2014), Alcohol and Breastfeeding. Basic Clin Pharmacol Toxicol, 114: 168-173. https://doi.org/10.1111/bcpt.12149↩︎

  10. Wilson, J., Tay, R.Y., McCormack, C., Allsop, S., Najman, J., Burns, L., Olsson, C.A., Elliott, E., Jacobs, S., Mattick, R.P. and Hutchinson, D. (2017), Alcohol consumption by breastfeeding mothers: Frequency, correlates and infant outcomes. Drug and Alcohol Review, 36: 667-676. https://doi.org/10.1111/dar.12473↩︎

  11. Chaves RG, Lamounier JA, Cesar CC. Factors associated with duration of breastfeeding. Jornal de Pediatria 2007; 83: 241–6.↩︎

  12. Anderson AE, Hure AJ, Forder P, Powers JR, Kay-Lambkin FJ, Loxton DJ. Predictors of antenatal alcohol use among Australian women: A prospective cohort study. BJOG 2013; 120: 1366–1374.↩︎

  13. Hutchinson D, Moore E, Breen C, Burns L, Mattick R. Alcohol use in pregnancy: prevalence and predictors in the longitudinal study of Australian children. Drug Alcohol Rev 2013; 32: 475–482.↩︎

  14. Anderson, P.O (2018) Alcohol use during breastfeeding. Breastfeeding Medicine 13, 5 https://doi.org/10.1089/bfm.2018.0053↩︎