UK National Breastfeeding Awareness Week

[ailbhe]

Still nursing Linnea - more often than a month ago, in fact, because she asks more. She is often quite content to have me count to five ("One milk, two milk, three milk, four milk, five milk - down now!").

I want some of the Nestle cards one can buy from Baby Milk Action. I may source envelope re-use labels from them too; I've been thinking about them for a while now, and I think I really like the BMA ones.

My breastfeeding supporter course is going well. I am getting better, slowly, at not talking too much - but it's hard; I did learn that always knowing the answers in class gets you beaten up, but that was a long time ago and I worked hard at getting over it during my stint with the Open University. Now I need to learn to shut up again.

It doesn't help that sometimes I give information that the teachers don't have. Not often, but occasionally.

I did learn a neat trick to illustrate how the composition of breastmilk changes throughout a feed. There are two main parts to breastmilk - the watery, protein-bearing part, and the creamy, fatty part. For this illustration you will need:

200 ml of water and 5 ml of vegetable oil (or scale it up to see it more clearly)
1 natural sponge
3 glasses (tall thin ones work well)
1 bowl

Put the water and oil in a bowl, mix them up as best you can, and soak up as much as possible with the sponge.

Squeeze it out in three stages over the three glasses.

You will see that the first glass is mostly water - the sponge lets that out first. The second glass will have much more fat. And the third glass will have a much deeper layer of oil on top of a much, much smaller layer of water.

The point is that milk composition changes gradually throughout a feed; there isn't a foremilk part and a hindmilk part, like the oil and water in the bowl before you mix them; it's all mixed up together like inside the sponge and is released in gradually changing proportions.

Sort of :)

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

There's an interesting correlation popping up in Oakland, across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco.

As breastfeeding is gaining ground among poor folks there, the incidence of rickets among people of African ancestry, almost eliminated in the US otherwise, is rising.

Of course, breastfeeding doesn't cause rickets, so scientists have been researching it, and it seems to be related to a variety of interactions:

1. Formula is usually vitamin D supplemented, kids who drink forumla are getting more D than breast-fed kids.
2. In Oakland, kids who are poor are disproportionately black. The darker one's skin, the less efficiently one converts sunshine to vitamin D.
3. Kids in poor neighborhoods often have unsafe neighborhoods, unsafe playgrounds, and insufficient or no yards at all. They don't play outside as much, period. They watch more TV. They are, all in all, exposed to less sunlight.

Those things combined seem to have a lot to do with it. They're kids who get less light, don't convert it well, and aren't getting supplements.

There's still no answer as to why this is the case in Oakland and not Detroit or Philadelphia or Chicago, and so far, these are only correlations and guesses, no real proof. It's just interesting, and we might need to find another way, while encouraging breast-feeding, to make sure kids are getting enough vitamin D.

[ailbhe]

Vit D and Iron are both pushed pretty hard by pediatricians in the US - a *lot* of the questions in the various breastfeeding fora are "my doctor says my kid needs [D/iron] but I can't afford it, do I have to do it anyway?"

The answer is basically "not if you're white and can get 10 mins of daylight on the hands and face daily".

Do kids in Oakland stay out of the sun more because it's harsher? seems unlikely.

There's also the weaning-malnutrition phenomenon, though I don't know if that's in America's poor population or just urban undeveloped countries'. It's more common among breastfed babies because they are weaned off infant-appropriate milk at an earlier age than formula-fed babies.

And then there's the toddler-weaning malnutrition among the world's rural poor, when the toddler is weaned because the mother is pregnant but the non-milk diet available is inadequate, so the healthiest child in the family is the youngest.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Sun isn't especially harsher here, at all. Our latitude is Mediterranean, but we have clouds much of the winter, and a reasonable amount of fog in the summer. Kids stay inside because there is no safe place to play alone outside, and their parents aren't always willing and/or available to take them out.

Another thing here that seems very income-tied, that I've never seen researched, just my own observation, is that lower-income people are more likely to use huge strollers or pushchairs with a big, thick blanket draped over the top, keeping the kid in relative isolation. I don't know if this is to keep them safe, or quiet, or out of the weather, or what, but I see it often in my neighborhood and on public transportation. So even when they're out and about, they aren't getting a lot of sunlight.

[ailbhe]

Yeah, but those should affect low-income people wherever they are.

The blanket thing is interesting. I do it in summer to keep the sun off, and in winter if I have no raincover, but in most weather it's not a convenient thing to do.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I'd heard the story on the radio, so didn't have a link for you, but I just googled up some information:

http://cbs5.com/local/local_story_235212533.html
http://www.ecologycenter.org/terrain/article.php?id=13580
http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2007-05-02-voa54.cfm

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

And reading these stories, I find out what wasn't in the radio story, which was a handful of weeks ago: It's not just in Oakland, that's where the increase was first noticed, but it's around the US.

[ailbhe]

Aha! that makes far more sense.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

If you put a bit of paprika (or chili powder) in the oil the day before, it goes a bright orange colour, if you want it to be really obvious.

[songster.livejournal.com]

I do agree with the point that the change from foremilk to hindmilk is gradual, and it's a clever illustration, but I'm really not convinced by the science behind it.

The illustration appears to work simply because the oil and water begin to separate within the sponge. So when you start squeezing, you get the stuff from the bottom 1/3 of the sponge, which of course is mostly water.

You could demonstrate that pretty easily by putting the whole thing in a balloon, with the aperture at the top, and squeezing the fat-rich top layer out first.

I really, *really* don't think breasts work that way, with all the watery stuff in the glands at the bottom, and the fatty stuff in the glands at the top. Besides, breast milk has loads of proteins in, which serve as emulsifiers so you don't get that kind of separation anything like as quickly.

[ailbhe]

No, breasts don't work anything like that way, since they don't store stuff in advance but make it on the fly most of the time anyway, for starters, but it's not a demonstration, it's an illustration. It *does* help do away with the notion that there's foremilk and hindmilk and the two are delivered separately, which is a "fact" lots of people "know" about breastmilk.

Lies-to-children.