Hi everyone! I wondered if anyone is using the Enfamil A+ for babies who spit up or I guess in the U.S. it's called Enfamil AR?. It has added rice starch and really does help my baby girl, Gabriella. However, due to the rice starch it is very constipating. What have you done to help with constipation? We tried water with sugar, but I'm afraid she won't take in enough formula for her other feeds if filling up on water? Does that make sense? I know the water will go right through them. A nurse actually suggested the water idea. I think she said to try giving it two hours after a feed or one hour before.Well during the day Gaby feeds every 3 hours. It gets tricky. I forgot to ask if I can give water on a daily basis. Does the constipation get better the longer she's on the formula? We 've been mixing regular Enfamil with the Enfamil AR.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Lucy
DS 3 yrs olds
DD 12 weeks

Hi Lucy. We did try Enfamil AR with Lauren for a short time. It didn't help. For constipation problems, we mixed a small amt. of brown sugar in the bottles. It always worked for us.

You may want to try regular Enfamil and add oatmeal cereal to it to thicken it. I hear oatmeal is less constipating.

We tried it when Maggie was a baby. It didn't help and she would take less than just regular formula. Same results when we added the cereal ourselves too.

I do not have experience with that formula, just a thousand others before we went to nutramigen.

One thing I did want to add is that extra water alone does not make for less constipation. It is a falacy for sure. You need something that will absorb the water and bring it to the intestines with it in order to take care of constipation. Water is rapidly absorbed by the stomach and then in the early sections of the intestines so very little makes it down regardless of how much you give them. Curran was drinking 6 or more glasses of water a day (as a 2 to 3 year old) and it made NO difference and that is when I investigated this falacy.

I would try a smidge of mineral oil (with your peds direction) or some OTC thing like MOM. Other Moms have had success with oatmeal cereal instead of rice

We used it until we found out Sam was aspirating. It worked really well to keep the food down, but it was not thick enough to stop him from aspirating. We thicken with Barley cereal to keep constipation away. It works well for us. We do not use oatmeal as I have found that it doesn't agree with Sam real well. When Sam was on AR we added about 1T of karo to every 4 oz bottle. That seemed to work for some time, but then it quit working. Now we use juice. I replace some of the water in his bottles with juice. I mix up 24 oz of formula at a time, but I know that he is getting 4 oz of juice in a 24 hour time frame. This way he is not getting full on the juice and is eating more of his formula. Hope this helps!