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This article brings together data on the proportion of mothers who breastfed their newborn infants, the duration of breastfeeding, infants' intake of breast milk, and the lipid content of breast milk, and presents a simulation model that estimates a distribution of lipid intake from breast milk during the first year of life. The simulation results may be translated into two assumptions useful for public health risk assessments. First, at any given time, approximately 22% of infants under one year are being breastfed; the remaining 78% have no exposure to chemicals via their mothers' breast milk. Second, lipid intake for the nursing infants may be characterized by a normal distribution with a mean of 26.81 g/day and a standard deviation of 7.39 g/day. In combination with measured or estimated concentrations of chemicals in the fat of breast milk, this distribution is suitable for estimating nursing infants' exposures to lipophilic chemicals. These results are based on data for probability and duration of breastfeeding which were standardized to the United States population, and on data for lipid intake from a sample of white, middle- to upper-income, highly educated women living in or near Davis, California.