Breastfeeding & Early Life Outreach with Versatile Education in Nutrition (BELOVEN)

Diet, lifestyle and environment in the first 1000 days—from pregnancy through a child’s 2nd birthday are critical for lifelong health across generations (1).

Pregnancy and lactation are nutritionally demanding and stressful on the woman's body as she supports fetal and infant growth and development. However, standard medical care does not offer universal diet education and counseling for pregnant and postpartum women.

For infants, exclusive human milk feeding (breastfeeding or expressed breast milk) during the first 6 months of life protects infants against childhood respiratory tract infections, ear infections, gastrointestinal infections and diarrhea, allergy and asthma, type 1 diabetes and overweight and diabetes later in life (2). In young children, diet is important for a healthy metabolism, developing immune system and brain (1).

For these reasons, national and international health authorities recommend exclusive breast milk feeding for the first six months. While most women in the U.S. and California, have tried to breastfeed their infants, only 25% of infants meet these recommendations (3).

There are many reasons that explain the low breastfeeding rates in the United States such as lack of federal paid family and medical leave, inadequate workplace policies, and unsupportive hospital practices and policies to name a few.

Two other major barriers that thwart successful breastfeeding are: 1) lack of universal prenatal breastfeeding education and 2) lack of universal postpartum lactation support in the first few weeks after giving birth.

While breastfeeding is natural, it is not intuitive or obvious and requires education prenatally and professional clinical support in the early postpartum period to help women achieve their breastfeeding goals (4-5).

BELOVEN, which means promise, is a pilot program that is designed to provide women with prenatal nutrition and lactation education and also lactation postpartum support. Prenatal education is delivered using simple, short videos and postpartum lactation support is delivered to women using video conferencing with lactation specialists training to become International Board Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLC). The program also offers a separate education platform for healthcare providers on evidence-based research in nutrition, health and lactation via webinars with accredited continuing medical education.

The ultimate goal of BELOVEN is to use a holistic approach to improve diet for both women, infants and their children by supporting their health and breastfeeding goals.

This project uses a mixed-methods approach incorporating literature reviews, personal and expert opinions, a patient-guided iterative design and implementation science to test the user-experience of an interactive online health education program with trained nutritionists; lactation consultants and counselors.

References