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

[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.