“Babies, Breastfeeding, and Tailored Milk: How Breast Milk Adapts to Meet Your Baby’s Health Needs”

While breastfeeding, Mallory noticed that her baby girl had a cold and was irritable. The next morning she started pumping as usual and noticed that her breast milk was a different color. It was yellower than the day before. ‘Mad madness’, she calls it herself. The milk resembled colostrum – the first breast milk your baby receives – which contains many antibodies, proteins and substances that stimulate the baby’s growth.

Your baby’s needs

Mallory snapped a photo of that day’s milk and the day before, shared it on Facebook and wrote, “Not too long ago I read an article in a medical journal about how breast milk adapts to meet baby’s needs at birth. more ways than just the calorie intake.’ In other words: the composition of breast milk adapts to the health needs of your baby. The photo of two different types of breastfeeding went viral and was shared about 80,000 times.

In the article that Mallory talks about, a doctor explains that when a baby is breastfed, the baby’s saliva flows back into the mother’s nipple. The recipients of the mammary glands scan, as it were, the ‘washed back baby saliva’ for bacteria and viruses. And if they see something abnormal (if the baby is sick or fighting an infection), the mother’s body changes the composition of the milk. The breast milk is thus adapted to the specific needs of the baby by producing tailor-made antibodies.

Exchange mother and baby

Multiple studies on breastfeeding support what this doctor says. Research shows that the exchange between mother and baby influences the composition of breast milk. For example, it has a higher fat content in the evening and contains more building blocks that babies use to produce melatonin and help with sleep. In addition, a study in Clinical and Translational Immunology (published in 2013) shows that white blood cell counts in breast milk increase when the baby is sick.

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Bron: Mamamagazine.