Can you eat chocolate when breastfeeding?

A few mums have asked me if you can eat chocolate when breastfeeding. Short answer, yes you can.

Chocolate contains two stimulants, caffeine and theobromine. These stimulants DO pass into our breast milk, but let’s look at each of these substances in more detail:

1. Caffeine – milk chocolate contains only small amounts of caffeine, around 20mg per 100g of milk chocolate, while dark chocolate can have up to 100mg of caffeine per 100g. (In comparison, an espresso coffee contains 145 mg of caffeine.)

2. Theobromine – is a stimulant similar to (but not the same as) caffeine. Theobromine is found in cocoa solids, which means that the darker the chocolate the higher the theobromine. There is about 150-200mg of theobromine in 100g of milk chocolate, but up to 10 times that amount in dark chocolate (!) Note that white chocolate does not contain any cocoa solids, and therefore has hardly any theobromine.

Research tells us that, as a general rule, the stimulant effects of eating chocolate when breastfeeding are not a concern for breastfed babies if you’re only consuming small amounts.

(Jitteriness and irritability has been reported in the baby of a mum who was having around 250g of chocolate per day (which is about 20 small Freddo Frogs, or 5 of the individual sized Cadbury chocolate bars), but the symptoms disappeared once she cut down on her chocolate consumption.)

So, unless you’re eating chocolate in very large amounts (I’m not naming names!) your baby is unlikely to be affected.

Hope this info is helpful. Shona x