11/08/2021
The wonders of breast milk!
Last week was and we wanted to share some amazing breastfeeding facts (adapted from a post on IG by and article by ):
1. When a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's ni**le, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This "baby spit backwash" contains information about the baby's immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition.
If the mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, they compel the mother's body to produce antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby's body, where they target the infection.
2. Even before babies have any concept of time, breast milk helps them understand certain hours from other hours, night from day.
There are hormones in breast milk, and they reflect the hormones in the mother's circulation. The ones that help facilitate sleep or waking up are present in your milk. And day milk is going to have a completely different hormonal milieu than night milk.
3. Mother's milk informs babies of not just the present, but also the past. Mothers who are vegetarians in adulthood, but ate meat as teenagers, have stored fatty acids that are specific to animals. When they mobilize that fat to produce breast milk, their babies receive those nutrients. Essentially, your whole life span is present in your milk, telling your baby about the world its mother has lived in. 💚
