Better Than Ice Cream!

Breastmilk tastes like the milk at the bottom of a bowlful of sweetened cereal. 

Here are some other tasty tidbits about breastmilk and breastfeeding:

Our Milky Way Galaxy was named for the spray of milk from the Greek goddess Hera when baby Hercules nursed from her.  The drops of milk that fell to earth became lilies.

Human milk kills cancer cells in the laboratory, something that the milk of other species doesn’t seem to do, and kills them in a way that doesn’t interfere at all with healthy cells.

Human milk gets creamier and higher in antibodies as the nursing child gets older.

Because formula-fed toddlers have eaten the same thing every day for months, they tend to be pickier eaters than breastfed toddlers, who always get a taste of whatever Mama’s been eating.

Bedwetters are more likely to have been formula-fed.

Breastmilk is high in lactose, which is important “brain food.”  It’s extraordinarily rare for a baby to be truly lactose intolerant.  And babies are never allergic to their mother’s milk. 

Human newborns, like all other mammal newborn, can find the breast on their own, if they are picked up and held against a shoulder.  And what is Mama’s instinctive reaction if her baby is unhappy?  To hold him against her shoulder!  It’s a feed-the-baby duet.

The World Health Organization recommends nothing but breastfeeding for about 6 months, with continued breastfeeding (along with solid foods) to age two or older.

Breastmilk in a baby’s eye helps prevent and treat eye infections.  It also works on children and adults.

IQ tends to increase with increasing length of time breastfed.

Nursing mothers don’t make more and more milk the older the baby gets; a baby at breast just uses the milk more and more efficiently as he or she grows.

The word “mammal” probably comes from Latin baby talk for “breast.”  Children today still care much more about the breast and the relationship than about the milk itself. 

Babies who were never breastfed are about 25% more likely to die between 1 and 12 months of age than babies who have had even a little breastmilk.

Breastmilk may taste wonderful and do all kinds of great things for the child who gets it… but it doesn’t make very good yogurt.

©2007 Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC  www.normalfed.com