Association Between Maternal Dietary Inflammation Potential and Exclusive Breastfeeding

Background: Breastfeeding duration is associated with multifactorial determinants including physiological and socio-demographic. An inflammatory diet could inhibit milk production via inhibition of mammary lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activity. We evaluated the association between dietary inflammation potential and exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) in a Midwestern U.S. setting where dietary patterns tend to be high in inflammatory foods.Methods: We used data from the Cincinnati subcohort of the Global Exploration of Human Milk (GEHM) Study, a longitudinal cohort of mother-infant pairs, in which mothers who did not achieve =75% breastfeeding by week 4 postpartum were excluded from further follow-up. 24-hour dietary recalls from 3 random days between weeks 4 and 13 postpartum were used to compute the dietary inflammatory potential via the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII). Data were analyzed using R Studio. Participants (n=108) were categorized into low, medium, and high DII tertiles. Since we observed nearly identical EBF trends for the first two DII tertiles, we combined these categories to increase the precision of the estimate. Then, we compared the proportion of EBF at 6 and 13 weeks postpartum between low/medium DII (n=72) versus high DII (n=36) groups. Comparisons used Fisher exact test and logistic regression analysis (OR [95% CI]), the latter stratified by prepregnancy BMI and maternal race. Results: Maternal prepregnancy BMI and proportion of WIC enrollment were significantly higher in the high DII group (p