How Feeding Babies Works: The Breast

afternoon drinking. You know, yeah, you know, a couple of drinks, maybe i'd be bloody Mary. What were we talking about. Oh, yeah, we're promoting our show. Oh, that's right. So we're doing that show on January. Uh. You can go to the s F Sketch Fest website to get tickets and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows

that weekend and for the following weeks. So I I encourage you, like to buy lots of tickets just by our first Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because they're selling out fast. No joke, that's not a ploy that's not as a marketing ploy. They're really selling fast. We get emails every time. Guys, you told me to hurry, I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promos petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to Stuff you should Know front House Stuff Works

dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know. Just two of us again, that's fine, yea, two dudes. We're nipples, right, totally useless nipples though, Uh yeah, we did a show why do men have nipples? In um By the way, I think we should change the name of the show to two dudes, four nipples. Okay, might be onto something. Uh, And that factored in not

much to this podcast, but it just's worth mentioning. Yeah, exactly. And you have been wanting to tackle breastfeeding as a topic for a long time. Yeah, And as I got into it, I was like, we can't just to uh how breastfeeding works. It's just too unwheeldy. It's got to be too party. And I realized that it would be folly to also name it how breastfeeding works, So we're calling it how feeding Babies Works Part one in part two. Yeah, we may friendship up though and call the second one

part who knows? Uh Yeah, And this one is, um you you have been reticent to do this one because it is fraught with anytime you're dealing with babies and moms, it is fraught with differing opinions. Differing Ah, not just among people listening and how they feel about everything, but from the medical commune, any differing different recommendations. So like there isn't really one set way ever, and people think like their way is the way. Your way is not

the way. There's a straight up culture war going on over it. Yeah, and that's an easy way to say it. So I see why you waded into this gently and with some trepidation. But I feel like once once we got in there, you know, we can we can talk about anything agreed. But I think I said some of that is a way of just saying, hey, if we get some stuff wrong, if you if you disagree with

some of the stuff, we're just throwing it out there. Yeah, And we're also we're going to try our best not to man spain because this very easily could end up being the very definition of man spaining what two men doing a two part show on breast belt So we we try not to do that. So if we do, you can hold us accountable. But yeah, we're just trying to deliver information that we found. Yeah, I'm none of this. I have no opinion on any of this. Actually, ready, okay,

So to start. Actually, one of the things that inspired this was a really great, um, a really great article by a woman named Angela. I'm not quite sure how to say your last name, Garbage, maybe I'm It was in The Stranger and um. She she was breastfeeding at the time and was just fascinated by it. So she wrote this really great article in The Stranger about breastfeeding

and um. One of the things she points out is that when women breastfeed, they literally, she they quote literally dissolved parts of ourselves, starting with the gluteal fomoral fat a k a R. Butts and turn it into liquid to feed our babies. In your mind was blown. Yeah, there's just a lot of um, a lot of really amazing stuff. When you start to look in the breastfeeding, breast milk, what what the body is doing, it's pretty mind blowing. Actually every single aspect of human reproduction. To me,

it is mind blowing, and not just human just period reproduction. Right. Making a little thing inside of a body PEPs and wee wee's cps and we's coming together to make another living thing is just one of the most amazing, miraculous things. It is pretty neat, just unbelievable. So with breast milk, right, um, there's different stages of of of breast milk production. There's actually, I think, as far as I know, three stages of what's called lacto genesis. Right. Stage one, um is the

basically the pre milk stage that happens before birth. Stage two is what's called colostrum, which is a kind of milk and not what you think of his breast milk. No, it's it's basically and I'm going to accidentally use the word designed a lot, but it's basically specifically designed to feed of a baby for the first few days after its birth. And then there's the third stage, which is called milk maintenance. But the but the milk is made

this is pretty nuts. So you've got these little tiny cell clusters called al viola, right, and that's where actual milk production occurs and in these alveola, they basically they have something called lacticites, and lacticites go into the bloodstream and gather nutrients it needs to form the milk, right, and depending on what is needed at any given point in time, it will retrieve those nutrients and antibodies and all that stuff and put them together and then create

the milk. That's pretty awesome. So the milk is literally made from the woman's body. Okay, it's not delivered my guy in a white hat, right, but there's no like milk store or anything like that. At any given point in time, the the actual components of a woman's breast milk is different from maybe what it would be the next day or later that night or a week before. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's its own recipe on a day to day basis. Um, which we'll talk more about that

cool stuff later too. Uh So it is uh low and fat, but really high in proteins and carbohydrates. Well, the the calostroum is Yeah, that that first yellowish um thick as you call it, a thick golden liquid, which, um, that's a good way to describe it. If you've ever

seen it. Like you know, you can just type it in and images and that'll that'll have pictures of it next to um breast milk, and you can it's a pretty stark difference and it looks like But the whole point is that is it's super easy to digest for a newborn baby and gives that baby exactly what they

need two get going in life. Uh, including you know that it gives them a head start, including having lacks of effect to get rid of that first poop, which is called the maconium um, which is as a waiting on that first poop is a very big deal because then you know things are moving as it should, and then you know then it's nothing but poop. Um. And a breastfed baby has a little bit different poop than a formula fed baby. Um. It's a little more yellowish

than brown, and supposedly doesn't smell quite as bad. Um. That's what they say. I've seen that it actually smells a bit like buttermilk. I don't know, altogether unpleasant and um. Because the breast milk is well absorbed. Babies who are breastfed are very rarely constipated too. Yes, so you got that's the colostrum, and after several days, the colostrum um goes away and is replaced instead by what's called mature breast milk. The good stuff, the yeah, the stuff you

think of when you think of breast milk. So um. It's about three to five percent fat and is chock full of minerals and vitamins UM, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, vitamins A, C, and E long chain fatty acids uh that are both omega three's and omega six is UM. And then you also have lactose. It's the principal carbohydrate, right and um. Liketose is important because it's just a huge,

wonderful energy source. Um. And it also has the proteins in it are a specific kind of protein their way proteins, right, So, in in cow's milk or in um livestock milk, the proteins usually casein, which isn't as easy to digest. In breast milk, the protein is way, which is extremely easy to digest for human babies. And then even more interesting, chuck, there's something called oglio sacc rides. Yeah, this is amazing. These are sugars uh, like a hundred and fifty or

more and they are only in human milk. Yeah, that's pretty astounding, right, So you're thinking, well, it's neat they're they're nutrients that are only found in human milk, which is for human babies. Makes sense with The weirder thing though, is that these oglio sacarides can't be digested by the baby. They're not actually for the baby. They're actually nutrients for the gut flora in the baby's guts, in the baby's

stomach to help it digest food. Even better, so it's actually food for the microbiome of the baby in the breast milk. It's amazing, man, I just keep wanting to drop this mind. I think you're saying oglio sacarides. What was it? What is it? Oh? Yeah, that's all right, I misplaced the g That's okay, that happens, um. So I know one of the big things too, that that um has been amazed amazing you for a while because you've dropped this fact a lot lately, is that the

the human body. Uh, we know how the human body fights off immunity, but something really unique happens when a mother's breastfeeding a baby is it's a bit of a

two way street. There's a vacuum created um when the baby is breastfeeding on the nipple, and if a baby needs uh some sort of immune immunity response boost, then the baby's saliva will actually enter back into the woman through the nipple and Mommy, all of a sudden her body says, oh, you're telling me that you need this to fight off some sort of sickness perhaps, so now my body will produce that and then render it back to you in the breast. Unbelievable. Yeah, it's pretty pretty amazing.

There's like receptors in the memory gland that analyze the saliva for pathogens and then produce antibodies as a result. That's crazy awesome. Yeah, So the breast smoke is chock full of nutrients. It's chuck full of um proteins and fats and all this great stuff, as well as antibodies. So the baby being breastfed has um this uh, this established um microbiome, thanks in large part to what the

mom's breast milk is giving it. Yeah, and like you said, like her despite all the things in the breast milk, a woman's body can also say, oh, you need this to let me whip some of that up, right, because I deliver that to you as well. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool um and even cooler. Well, I don't know if it's even cooler, right, I'm gonna keep saying that. But there's when when UM a woman nurses, there's basically two stages of the actual nursing. The first stuff to

come out is called four milk. It's kind of Finnish and bluish and it's mostly water and it's meant to look like for the baby's thirst had for hydration, right, because a baby can subsist for the first four to six months of his life solely on breast milk, doesn't even need water, it's getting it from that fur milk. And then the stuff that comes out after the four milk UM is called hind milk, and that's the creamier stuff that's higher and fat, and that's what fills the

baby up. Yeah. And so if if all this talk of immunity of building and UH and stuff like that makes you think that a breastfed baby might potentially be UM less susceptible to illness than a formula fed baby, some studies show that that is possible. UM every situation is different, of course. Uh. You you can have breastfed babies that get sick a lot. You can have formula fed babies that never gets sick. There is no like

across the board thing. But the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months because they do think it can lead to fewer illnesses, fewer hospitalizations, or at least milder illnesses. Right. And it's not just those two, the the UM, government of the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, Japan, all of them recommend that women breastfeed exclusively for six months. Right um.

But as Angela Garbas pointed out though this those health outcomes,

those positive health outcomes, they're relatives. Right. So, if your baby is born in the West, in a developed nation UM with state of the art technology, and is born a relatively healthy baby, the the benefits from breastfeeding are going to be much less than if you compare that baby to a baby that's born in a developing nation where the water um, the water available is um impure, a lot of disease perhaps um and uh and and the country is generally poverty stricken, that baby will benefit

tremendously more from breastfeeding, uh than would the kid born in the modern, developed, richer country. Yeah. Absolutely, um. And also we'll see, we're gonna get into it for sure. We we can't avoid it. But there's there's a lot of conflicting studies on breastfeeding and health outcomes and the benefits of it. But we'll wait into that later. Yes, with our kevlar vest. Uh. So let's talk a little

bit more about some of them, the benefits of breastfeeding. Um. One of them is, if you just want to look strictly at numbers, Um, if a woman's body produces something for free that you would normally have to purchase in a store, in the form of formula, then it's just gonna be flat out cheaper. Um. This four number in here is way low. Oh really, Yeah, it says in the US, families can save an average of four dollars

a year even with the cost of a breast pump. Um. Yeah, that's gotta be low because because you spend I think the average cost of formula for a year is closer tous um. And then subtract, of course for the breast pump and stuff. But let's just say you'll save some money, right. You'll also save having to get up and go to the kitchen to make some formula or um, having to uh wash out bottles, sterilized bottles, stuff like that. Yeah, although I think most women probably do pump and dump

in bottles yeah these days. Yeah, so um yeah, saving money, maybe saving a little inconvenience, that's one positive. Yeah. The funny thing is that this little section this that comes from the house stuff Works article on breastfeeding, it makes it sound like breastfeeding is just so easy and convenient, you know, like there's definite to it. Stop complaining. Yeah, so we should talk a little bit about these two hormones that are super super important uh to breastfeeding and

period in life. Yeah, because these are definite benefits of breastfeeding. It's it's just not you can't argue with it. Yeah, we're talking about oxytocin and prolactin and um. Prolactin. Prolactin tells the milk hey make more milk, tells the glands that it basically makes that production happen. Oxytocin is what gets the breast milk to your baby. Milk let down is what it's called. Yeah, which is kind of a

let down. Sounds like something bad, it does. I don't know how they called it that, but yes, let down is good in this case. But as long as you're feeding, breastfeeding, or you're pumping, then your body is going to continue to release that prolactin and it's just sort of a feedback loop, right exactly. And and there's there's this neat

kind of um. It's all hormonal, right, prolactin, oxytocin, the hormones, but there's this neat like hormonal balance where when your breast gets full, milk productions throws down and then when your breast empties, milk production speeds back up. It's pretty cool. It is so Oxytocin specifically is really amazing. Uh. That is a chemical messenger and it releases um released from the brain and a lot of it. I mean, it's not just something that happens with women. Oxytocin. We all

have it. Yeah, it's a social, promoting, promoting hormone exactly. And skin on skin contact is where things is where things get really interesting, right. It actually triggers the release of oxytocin. Right, and there's if there's one thing that a new mother's brain is primed to um to experience its floods of oxytocin. And there they actually believe that this is the the basis for the the incredible mother

infant bond that occurs. It's this huge surge of oxytocin that takes place during labor after birth and is sustained through skin to skin contact including breastfeeding. Yes, uh, and

this happens. This is another pretty amazing fact. In those early stages of that that flood of oxytocin, nerve junctions and parts of the mother's brain actually reorganized and it becomes like, uh, maternal instinct becomes hardwired at that point, right, Exactly, like the oxytocin receptors start to um to spread all

over the place in vast numbers. Right. And so when the when the um these maternal behaviors, I guess you'd call it if you want to talk about a woman like you're a biologist, right, Um, the the oxytocin is released, and so the the pattern is reinforced and it's like you said, like the brain is structurally reorganizing into motherhood. Yes, it's pretty astounding. Yeah, and they recommend, Like I've said that after everything we've said, Um, let's say you don't breastfeed.

Let's say you uh aren't able to breastfeed, let's say you have adopted your child. But there's all sorts of scenarios maybe where you don't breastfeed. They still recommend that skin on skin contact as soon as possible and as much as possible. Um, and not just for mom. Um, Dad's get in on that action. Uh. There's nothing better than than laying chest to chest with a newborn baby. And that skin on skin contact works the same way

with men. It's just not quite as a robust release of oxytocin, right, But that there have been plenty of studies that have shown that children who um don't have that skin to skin contact, don't develop um as securely in their brains, don't necessarily develop as robustly or at least socially um as kids who do have the skin to skin contact. A lot of people take that to mean that breastfeeding is what's responsible for that. That's not

the case. Breastfeeding allows for that skin to skin contact, so it does allow for that oxytocin release and the child to develop more securely. But you, like you were saying, you can also get the same thing from holding the baby skin to skin without even breastfeeding. Yeah, and the and the When this insecurity and underdevelopment occurs, it appears to be from neglect, maternal and paternal neglect rather than um. The fact that the breastfeeding is so great at it

the breastfeeding forces that essentially. Does that make sense? Yeah, okay, so there's even more on oxytocin, right, the the oxytocin prevents I saw a study that showed that mothers who breastfeed had about half the levels of stress hormone release as um mothers who didn't breastfeed. Um, it allows for imprinting odor imprinting, yeah, for baby and mom. Right, so I recognize your smell. Right. The baby um became accustomed to the smell of its amniotic fluid in the womb

thanks to oxytocin. Well, the mother's breast smells similar to the smell of the amniotic fluid, so the baby is able to um find the mother's nipple after being born just from that smell. Right. All of this is fostered from oxytocin, and it's it's um hardwired through oxytocin as well. But our understanding of oxytocin and how it does it is we basically you can replace oxytocin with saternal magic. Right, there's like we just don't understand how it's doing all this.

We just know that it does thanks to rodent studies. Yeah, that sounded funny, but it's true. Yeah. Um, and it also reduces the your baby's stress hormone responses. So they've done studies where they found it in um. Like let's say, and I'm a continent of Africa where mothers tend to carry their babies a lot more than like here in the United States. Maybe that there the babies tend to cry less and are able to soothe self soothe more, and are just more suitable period because they're just simply

um held more. Yeah. Well, there's also supposedly studies of i think children in Eastern Europe who are raised from infancy and orphanages that were had had tremendous like social maladaptations, and they traced it back to not having been held as children. Like that's huge, it's huge. And apparently skin skin on skin holding is the solution to that. Yeah, we amly. I call it ski wee skin to win. That came from our friend. We didn't make it up except he was talking about like Friday night in the

hot tub. You guys just adapted it. Yeah, exactly, one of the other amazing things. And then, um, we'll probably take a break after this. But finishing up on oxytocin. I feel like we could almost do a whole podcast on oxytocin. Yeah, we really should. The wonder hormone. Um, but with that high level, that big rush of oxytocin, Mom's priority has actually become altered. And the brain says, you know what, you don't have to uh groom yourself and and try and make yourself look a certain way

to obtain a mate anymore. Now your priority is feeding this little babe. And so it literally kind of switches that off in the brain. So Mom's like, great, I don't have to, like now I groom my child. I don't have to worry about myself as much. Why is my hair so long? I'm gonna chop this off stupid necklace? Yeah, pretty much. And it's I don't know, it's kind of

funny when you think about it. But uh, it's almost like the body saying, take a break from that stuff, focus on babe for a little while, and uh maybe later on once the oxytocin goes down, once you want another baby maybe. So uh. And prolactin is similar in a lot of ways. We don't want to sell that short, but um, it's in the maid in the pituitary gland in the brain helps people sleep, helps maintain reproductive organs, your immune system, and it's what prepares the mommy's breast

to make breast milk. It also, um, while the mom is nursing, it is released and it has this kind of relaxing effect so that mom's just happy to sit there and breastfeed, not after like worry about getting up and doing something else. She's just content doing that. Yeah, it's all it's all of this is design to keep mommy kind of doped up and happy to just take care of a baby and like to love that baby.

Her brain is physically rewired by oxytocin to love that one baby right there, all right before we say amazing again, We'll take a break. We'll I'm back right after this.

So um, chuck. A lot of the talk of how magic this is and how natural it is, and how hormonally driven all of this is has led a lot of people, um, and I'm sure there's a lot of women out there who have experienced a lot of difficulty, um with breastfeeding right from the get go and probably felt a lot of um, frustration, shame, rejection, yet rejection, resentment, all sorts of like seemingly horrible feelings because breastfeeding didn't

come naturally. That's right. Apparently breastfeeding is as natural a thing as it is. It's actually not like no one walking around just naturally knows how to do it. It takes some practice. You have to learn how to do it first. Yeah, Like sometimes the breast milk won't come in for a few days. Like ideally you want to be breastfeeding, like within a few hours if you can one hour, within the first hour is what's recommended. Yeah, And and if that doesn't happen, at least get that

ski wee going. Um yeah, yeah, but sometimes it takes a few days for the breast melt to come in. There are conditions where breast milk may never come in. Um. What I would advise is to stay off the mommy blogs. Uh, they can be helpful, but they can also really be tough on a new mother. Yeah, if you feel like you don't measure up to breastfeeding ideal, there's a lot

of judgment going on. Um. Even if you just look up like breast milk didn't come in, you'll find some women that say, yeah, you know sometimes that happens, and their women say like, you just gave up, you got lazy with it, and you didn't work at it right. Apparently, the recommendations that I found, and I didn't find them judgmentally, they seem to come from non judgmental place was keep trying. Basically, Um, I'm sure that there is some line, and every mother

has her own line. Once she gets to that line, just done. But apparently, if your if your milk isn't coming in the best way to get it to come in is to keep nursing, to keep getting the breast milk flowing, because it's eventually going to get the prolactin going, and the prolactin is going to get the milk in, and it's going to get the oxytostin going, and the oxytocin is going to let the milk down. So just trying to breastfeed apparently is the best fixed for breastfeeding problems.

Another thing to do is to reach out to what's called the lactation consultants. Yeah, there are professionals out there who will um advise you. I mean, they're all kinds of services that can help you with everything from advising you are counseling you UM to literally um showing you um different methods which will get to on how to literally physically breastfeed, like how to hold the baby, how to do all that stuff. It's just it's sort of

like a coach in a way. Coaching counselor I think is a good way to put it, and they can really really help. And don't don't hesitate to reach out Like it doesn't mean that you're not a good mom or or that things aren't coming naturally to you. So something is wrong with you. This one that that shame needs to get out of your head. I know, it

needs to get out of society. Yeah, but it's it's tough, you know, right if you have a baby, there's you know, I mean we should do one on postpartum depression too. It's um. Sometimes you are at the whims of what your body and your hormones are doing, you know, and someone who might normally not feel those things feel those things right. Um. And then you add on top of these social expectations and friends and neighbors and the nurses and the doctor and everybody will just showed up. You know,

Oh you're not breastfeeding. Yeah, there's this really this is great article that um Hannah Rosen wrote. It was published in the Atlantic in two thousand nine, called the Case against breastfeeding controversial, and she um, just some of the stuff she she mentions just some of the casual vibing out that a mom encounters when she says she doesn't breastfeed, and just there's a lot of um, a lot of

social pressure to breastfeed. If you if you've chosen to breastfeed and you're having trouble with it, what we're saying is there's yeah, go find a lactation consultant. That's fine.

At the same time, make sure you're also in close contact with your doctor, your child's doctor, because if your breast milk isn't coming, your baby still needs to ate something, right, UM, So you're doc, you will be able to tell you well, you might want to go buy some some human milk, or you might want to introduce your baby to formula

while you're also nursing too. We're trying to nurse to get your breast milk coming so that your baby has enough nutrients and calories and everything, or um, if it's not coming in as much. Uh. Like, some women might not go to the doctor, like because they're producing breast milk,

but they're not producing enough on a daily basis. So there are cases where a baby is like hospitalized and they found that the baby is actually suffering some from a form of dehydration hypernatrema, which is like a slute

imbalance that that a baby can die from. And yeah, it comes from basically women being so so thoroughly scared off from formula or shamed away from formula that their their baby is not getting enough milk, but they they are afraid to supplement it with anything like formula, so the baby ends up in dire straits. Uh. I want to take this chance to recommend another podcast. We're talking about Judge e um people um One Bad Mother, Great

Great Mom actually parenting podcast. It's called One Bad Mother, but plenty of dads listen as well, uh. And it is on the Max Fun Network and our friends, my friend Teresa Thorne and biz ellis her co host. Uh. It's just a great, fun, funny podcast, very supportive, not judgmental. Uh. And I was a guest and told a bit of my adoption story a while ago. I can't remember what it was his last year. I remember that it was

obviously it was sometime after Yeah, Midsummer last year. Do you remember the name of the episode or the number? Now people are gonna want to know. You can google it, google that junk. But anyway, one one Bad Mother is great and find if it's not them, just find some good resource that is trustworthy and that you feel good about. So, with all that said, here's how you breastfeed. It's easy,

all right, Josh just took a shirt off. It's a little weird, you know, it's funny, Like some of these I was going through, like making the actual the can motions and everything. Yeah, some of it's tough to visualize, but others. And you may walk through and she's like, why are you cradling a loaf of Rye bread? And why is it crying? You could make Rye cry. It's

pretty powerful. So apparently the latch is everything right. The baby's got a latch on, and like you said, that vacuum has to be formed, and to form the vacuum, the baby's got to get a big old mouthful of boob nipple specifically, So when you're getting the baby to latch, you grab the breast around the nipple, around the aerial eye, and you basically um tickle the baby's mouth with your nipple, and she's like, okay, I'm opening wide, and you take her the bottom of her jaw and put it underneath

your breast. Apparently are underneath your nipple. I'm sorry. Also, don't listen to me. And then you you move her head forward onto um so that the top of her mouth is now on the nipple and taking in at least one to one and a half inches of airy od I as well. Yeah, isn't the idea that baby comes to mommy? Mommy doesn't like kneel down or lean over to baby. Isn't that the how it goes? That's what I saw. Uh. There are various types of holds.

The suplex, the figure four now sorry, that's wrestling, sleeper hole, the cradle position that is one of them. That's when you you have the baby on your forearm, her head and the crook of your arm and support the bottom with the other hand. Then pull a little baby close to you belly to belly, which is a great thing, with her ear, shoulder and hip in a straight line. Ye. So that's the cradle the football, Yeah, I call it the heisman. So you're you're laying on your back, right,

Is that what I'm getting here? Right? Well? The mom and then there's a pillow very close to your side with your baby on top. And I think you're both facing in opposite directions, right, or you're facing one another, but you're pointing in opposite directions. Yeah, okay, and um, you just lift the baby's your baby's head up to your breast from the side, and that's really good if you had a cesarean section, because I'm guessing you don't

want a baby anywhere near your belly after that. Yeah, the football, and I couldn't picture in my head as much. That was less clear. Okay, baby's facing this way, I'm facing that way and nothing's coming out. It's getting very disturbing here. Then you have the old sideline. Poor babies is getting a lot of hair in her mouth. Oh god. Uh, the sideline not the anything as a side eye. That's much different. Um. This is also good if you've had a c section or if you want to rest, if

you're worn out, um, while you nurse. So this is when you lie on your side, Uh, place your head on a pillow as mom, and pull the baby in close to you and use your arm to support her little baby bottom, which is adorable, and use your other hand to bring your breast up to the baby's mouth. So I think that would make sense to me. Yeah, all of it made sense to me. Well, you're I practiced that you had to look for bread. I did not. So again, if this isn't working at first, don't worry,

don't be discouraged. Don't take it like your baby doesn't like you or is rejecting you. That it's not the case. Try try again, Try try again, but also again if you reach your point. If you reach your limit, well then come up with plan B or go with plan B like no judgment. Yeah, and here's a pretty amazing fact. Uh, if you have adopted your baby, or if you use the surrocuate, or if you're female partners and new mothers. You can Actually the point is if you didn't give

birth to the baby. It's a long way of saying that you can actually induce lactation with a lot of time and patients not always, but it is possible to breastfeed a baby that you did not bear, which is astounding. Yes. Yeah, Like there's a lot of techniques you can use. Hand massages help quite a bit. You want to try UM hand expressing uh like eight to twelve times a days, basically squeezing shadow puppets UM. And you can also take something called UM. I love this word. Galactagogues. Yeah, that

totally sounds like a video game from the eighties. It's a type of chemical um that crew that's that spurs a woman's body to start creating breast milk. Right, And there's some that have been proven through scientific study, drugs like meta clodpromide. Right. Then apparently there's herbs that anecdotally work wonders, including fenny Greek. They don't have quite as much evidence based efficacy, but they may still work for you. It's worth trying. Yeah, And I think if you watch

a lot of Gilmore Girls that might help. Yeah, maybe popping steel magnolias any mother centric plot line, right, Actually, mommy dearest, I was about to say, psycho, Mommy dearest, you might want to stay away from those. Um, should we take another break? Oh? But sure? All right, let's do it. So, Chuck, let's say you've decided to breastfeed. Yes, how long should you breastfeed for? Well, that's up to you as an individual, obviously. Like we said, they experts

do recommend that first four to six months is pretty key. Um, And that doesn't mean it has to be exclusive. You know, if you want to augment with formula, you can do that. Uh, it's everyone's decision to make on their own. And then there was that lady. Remember that one lady made a lot of news because she was on the cover. I should have looked this up. She's on the cover of some magazine at the time or news week. Yeah, with a much older like a four or five year old.

I could remember the age of the of her sun that was breastfeeding and got a lot of flak for that. But um, it was like an article on attachment parenting, and I think that stuff. I can't remember exactly. I should look that up, but I'm pretty sure it was either Time or news Week, but anyway to make the point, like some women have done that where they breastfeed, like to their point where their kid is coming up and saying, hey, Mom,

I would love some food. Sure breast If you're doing that, Um, you want to make sure that your kid is eating plenty of other stuff as well, because the point of breastfeeding or breast milk is that it can sustain a child exclusively for the first four to six months of his or her life. After that you have to start supplementing,

either with formula or solid foods. And the rule of thumb that I saw um when knowing whether or not the baby was ready to start trying solid foods is if he or she is coordinated enough to let you know when she's full, then you could try to start supplementing with solids. But you you can breastfeed exclusively up to four to six months. After that, you just physically can't. There's not enough nutrients for you to produce to sustain your kid with breast milk alone after six months of age.

We've mentioned pumping a couple of times. We'll get more into that in Part two. But um, if you live under a rock you don't know what that is. That means you are just storing your breast milk. You're using a device, a machine. I guess you want to call it to um to store your breast milk for later. It means you like to have a drink once in a while, some layoff. Well we'll get to that too.

But as far as storage goes, here's the deal. It depends on how what kind of fridge freezer you store the breast milk in and how often that is opened. That Yeah, So like if you have one of those Uh, if you have a small old school fridge that has the little freezer section in the top of it, that is the shortest amount of time. That is only two

weeks of storage, even if it's in the freezer. Um. If you have a separate freezer in that same within that fridge, like the little freezer on the bottom or whatever, you can store it as long as three to six months. If you have a deep freezer in the garage right with the audience, keep your dead bodies like burning, keep your delivered steak subscription service and dead bodies of some guys pickup truck. Uh, you can actually store in the deep deep priests or six or twelve months, even though

uh they say it's past six months, it's not optimal. UM. So I think, like, you know, if you were through the zombie apocalypse happen and you have some twelve month old frozen solid breast milk, you can try and use that. Yeah, that we'll give our thumbs up on that one. In room temperature, apparently if it's a you know, coolish room and it's not the heat of summer with no a C,

we're talking about six hours, which is longer than I thought. Uh. And then up to five days in a fridge, although that's not optimal supposedly after about three days, and you just want to make sure in the fridge in anywhere, really everything is super super clean. You got a bottle cap on there all. Yeah, everything is is really really especially early um, early in baby's life. You want everything

really really really clean. So the UM one of the reasons, one of the big reasons that a lot of women pump is because they want a breastfeed, but they also either want to or need to get back to work. UM.

And this raises a big issue as far as breastfeeding goes. Right, there is some really great New New Republic review of a book called l Activism, and the reviewer is named Katherine Joyce, and she points out that and it's great that the World Health Organization, in the American Academy of Pediatrics and all of these guys say women should breastfeed exclusively for at least the first six months, but that that demand it puts a burden on basically no one

except for the mom. And then simultaneously we're saying breastfeed for six months and get back to work because we've got an economy to to uh to keep going, or you have rent to pay, or get back to work because you have your family need it right. And so Angela Garbas points out, like basically everything about breastfeeding is

at odds with holding down full time work. That breastfeeding for the first few months can take eight hours a day of time easily, but hey, go work for eight hours on top of that, And she says, I think quite reasonably that if we're telling people, for telling mothers, hey, you should breastfeed exclusively for six months, then they should also be given six months of paid maternity leave at a minimum, and that that should just be um should be enshrined in in American law. It may sound radical

to a lot of Americans. In fact, America is the only developed nation that doesn't guarantee paid time off for mothers. There's not a day of paid time off that a mother gets guaranteed under federal law in the United States. It's the only developed nation that doesn't have that law. It's one of only two nations that doesn't have it.

The other one is Papua New Guinea. In Papua New Guinea, of the people who lived there make their subsistence off of agriculture, they don't need to have a law like that. It's pretty amazing. Uh, that's amazing too, But in the opposite way that amazing. Um yeah, I mean, these days, there are a lot of jobs that are way more flexible as far as working from home or having lactation rooms, um,

flexible scheduling. Like a lot of companies have made it much easier for you with a combination of pumping and dumping to uh to still be able to do that. But if you're not lucky enough to be in one of those scenarios, and if you've got a job that's like nope, don't do that here, well then you gotta cut. Well, yeah, they have to do something. They have to allow some break time, and um, they have to provide some private place. But there's no specifications that it can't be some old

shower stalls. And of course that's just the law. Like, that doesn't mean every company absolutely does this across the board. Uh, there are people that run a foul of the law. You're right, and it is getting better though, it is getting better among employers. But in the United States, there's the Family Leave Act and it does guarantee twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Yeah, but your family might not be able to afford that, so that equals like no

maternity time. Yeah. And they've found across the board that, um that higher income families breastfeed longer. It's just the way it is. Um. Here's some more stats for you if you want to talk about how long to breastfeed. Uh. Most women stop within the first year. Uh. In two thousand thirteen, the CDC said seventy seven percent of American

women breastfed from birth. Uh, at that rate since birth, and then after six months that dropped to six But you make a big point, Well, you didn't make the point. You source these points I I I arranged them to make point. Yeah. Yeah, Now you make a point that it's a it depends on where you live in the world. Uh in Africa, on the continent of women breastfed beyond twelve months, So it definitely depends on where you are.

And you make the point, which is what I was getting to, is that a lot of these stats kind of stink because they're old, man, they stink and outnumbered, contradictory, contradictory, So it's really hard to kind of get great percentages on this stuff. But everything that we looked at does say that breastfeeding is on the rise, uh in what the last probably twenty years. Yeah, and that it's on the rise, especially among older, white, educated, wealthier women for

all the reasons we talked about. Yeah yeah, So uh, let's pull out a Bummersville for a second, chuck, and uh talk about the food food, Yes, like what a mom eats. Um, If the mom is is producing this milk, it would make sense in turn that the milk will end up because we said each recipe each day can be a little bit different. And if you had um, General Sal's chicken, Yeah, the night before your breast milk

might be a little spicier. Yeah, there's actually there's a study back in the the seventies at the University of Manitoba that took breast folk from breast smolk from women and had like a flavor professional tasting panel did an episode on those um sample and one of the women had eaten spicy food the night before and hers was described as hot and peppery. Yeah, pretty neat. It is

pretty neat. Uh. And then this one woman, and she's not the only one, of course, but it's lady named Julia Manella of the monell Chemical Sense to Center in Philadelphia said that she thinks and a lot of people agree that these early flavor profiles that the baby experiences developed uh, taste preferences for later in life. Right, that makes sense to me. I see no reason why that should not be true. No, No, I don't know that it's proven though, but it does make a lot of sense.

So when your breastfeeding, the rule of thumb that I've seen is that you want to eat about five more calories a day than you were before you were pregnant. Yeah, right, potato chips, candy bars, you know, you want to avoid that kind of stuff. Man, You actually, um want to avoid junk food instead, you want to eat the good stuff that's right, the stuff that's good for you, the stuff that's whole, This stuff that's chuck full of like good vitamins and it's nutritious, aka the food you should

eat period. But all that stuff is gonna pass right through you into your baby in the form of your milk. It's so it's the stuff you eat is like a gift to your baby. It's like passing that really great food along. That's right. Sometimes like uh, something that might give mom and baby problems if you eat like Brussels sprouts or cabbage, or things that might make you a little gassy broccoli. Everyone has different things that make them gassier.

Whatever that is for you that could cause some trouble. Um. What else anything anything like heavy and additives or dies like we're talking about like non whole foods, um could produce a little bit more issues for you and baby. Both onions, garlic, citrus is no good or just all of these things can they can produce problems? Right, So, if you've noticed that your baby um after eating, shortly after eating, is um drawing her legs up to her

her um stomach and screaming that's colic. It's probably because your baby has gas. You want to figure out what it is that you're eating that is giving your baby gas. UM. There's also other things that you can pass on to your baby that the baby doesn't want that can result in an unhappy baby. Caffeine UM that can pop up not just in coffee, but also things like coke and

chocolate and all sorts of stuff. There's also worries that babies can actually develop food allergies UM, which is entirely possible. UM that usually is sourced back to milk. You might not be lactose intolerant, but your baby might be. All this stuff you can figure out on your own very easily doing a very simple at home experiment. Take whatever food you think is making your baby unhappy UM and remove it from your diet for about a week. See if that clears it up. If it doesn't, it wasn't

that food. You can reintroduce that food. Yeah, it's UM. Like with any food allergy, it's just called an elimination diet, and you get rid of the stuff until you see a change. If it doesn't change, and move on to the next thing, and um, mom's usually pretty in tune with baby and UM ideally, and so it's um an elimination diet is is pretty I don't want to say easy, because it is time consuming and you should keep records of things. Um, but it's fairly intuitive. I think it's

what I was looking for. So um. Apparently they used to tell moms drink a bunch of beer because it'll aid in milk production. That sounds so true. It's ridiculous, all right, so it must be true. Yeah, so they realize that, no, you should probably not do that. Not only does it not aid in milk production, but apparently the blood alcohol content uh that you have about the

same percentage is past slong to your breast milk. The blood alcohol content of your breast milk is pretty much the same as your blood alcohol level at any given point, which is super low. Unless you've been drinking. Then it's super high, and then you're getting poor baby blitzed, well breastfeeding drunk. You would have to drink a lot. I don't know that that's the case, man, No, it's absolutely the case. Like your blood alcohol content, even if you're ripped,

is still super super low. As far as a percentage of alcohol in your blood. But we're talking about like that way like eight pounds. Oh no, no, no, I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying it's not like you're giving your kid a shot of booze. If you've um, you know it's it's And this is another one of those things that like if if you look at ten different places, you're gonna get ten different opinions, even from doctors.

I saw one doctor was like, you know what, this is one of those things that just makes it even harder for a woman is to tell her she shouldn't even have a glass of wine um when she's breastfeeding. UM. So really, I like, I literally looked at like four different things and they all said something different. What I did see what is there's a direct correlation between the amount that you're drinking and whether or not you're drinking it with food. UM. Just like with the blood alcohol

tenant UH levels. It has to do with the mom's weight um, and like the amount of fat like where alcohol is stored. So there's a lot of factors that go into it. UM. The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Drugs considers alcohol compatible with breastfeeding. So they said you don't have to abstain, but everything I read says like keep it in check and maybe don't like drink the wine while you're breastfeeding or within a couple of hours, like maybe have the glass of wine after you breastfed

and put baby down for the night. So the rule of thought myself is two hours uh for the alcohols out of your system, which means, um, if you're breastfeeding every two hours, you've gotta either pump and dump or hand express or yet time it so that it's not yeah, you're not passing it along. And this is after you know, nine months of probably abstaining from alcohol. Two yeah. Yeah, Hey, I'm I mean, I don't blame anybody for being like, I'm having a glass of wine. You know, Um, people

always say a glass of wine. Why didn't see people say I'm having a scotch. I'm having a fifth of Scotch. No, don't have a fifth. Do you have an institution attitude towards smoking and breastfeeding? Hum? Well, I mean I think you shouldn't smoke a period. I think that's true. So I guess you could say that in keeping with that I would say you shouldn't smoke and breastfeed. Yeah, but apparently, um, the nicotine is not good for milk. Milk production, It

diminishes milk production, yes, just on practical level. You're not doing yourself any favors. It reduces the amount of vitamin C president in your in your breast milk. Um, it can increase nausea in the baby. That alone, that's sad um and plus not to mention if you're actually smoking around the baby, come on. Uh. And then there's that

woman in Arizona. Do you remember her? The mom who got it just hugely, massively in trouble because she took her baby to the hospitals, like, something's wrong with with my baby and the doctor's tested it, and we're like, that's weird. Your baby has a lot of cocaine in his system right now, any idea, Why have you been doing cocaine? Well, yeah I did, But what's that got to do with my baby? Right? Are you breastfeeding? And she was like yes, I am, Well you pass the

cocaine onto your baby. Yeah. Yeah. The old days of walking around baby on breast with a cigarette in one hand and a scotch on the other and a bump of coke in your nose. Those days are long gone. We know better at this point, I was not breastfed, by the way, I'm pretty sure I was actually, now that you say that, I'm not. I don't know. Yeah, I feel securely attached. Yeah, my momy actually told me this, just like in the last six or eight years even, and I was like, huh, how did she tell you?

I don't remember. I think it was on my birthday card, your birthday, Happy birthday. And by the way, no, I can't remember. It just came up and I was like, oh, I didn't know that, and she said, yeah, you know. She I was her third kid, didn't have a lot of help from my dad, so she was managing a three year old and a six year old, and I think had a rough time breastfeeding my brother. Um, because my brother said she just wasn't organized enough. No, I'm

just joking out. Scott would have been like, let me hand express this for late there, I'll feed myself. Um. I think had a rough time breastfeeding Scott, and then UM, I think just sort of decided like, yeah, I got too much going on going with the formula for baby chuck.

And it was also at a time in the early seventies, like starting in the fifties through the seventies and eighties, even to a certain degree, there was a bigger move toward formula feeding and away from breastfeeding, because the notion was like, this science has finally figured it out. You don't need to breastfeed because we have this wonderful new thing called formula, which the name formula just cracks me up that that's what it's called. That they didn't think

of some name of it. I know, it's like the most generic clinical term they could have come on, like, hey, we came up with this formula that mem express milk. What should we call it? Formula? The originally is called formula X, but they thought that was too well, that makes more sense even than just formula. It's like, hey, we got this new recipe for chicken. What do you call it? Recipe? Good point, But that whole that whole um push starting in well as previous of the fifties.

We'll talk more about it in part two. But there's a lot of push back that came out as a result of this um trend toward formulas, right, And there are actually groups that are called l activist groups that UM started beginning with the lech A League UM, which was established in the fifties and the States among a group of Catholic moms who decided that it was their their biblical right, their biblical heritage to breastfeed their babies and that like that was what God wanted them to do.

And the League UH is still around today. It's one of the most prominent l activist groups around. UM. They're very active in in you know, public aware this, teaching, breastfeeding classes, all that stuff. But they grew out of this group of Catholic moms in the fifties who actually took their name from UM shrine down in Jacksonville. Oh really, yeah, the Jailorida, Jacksonville, Florida. Yet the name of the shrine is called Newest Dress Senora de la boene Parto, which

means our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk. Yeah. And they published UH in night a very famous pamphlet called The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding that eventually became a book and it was very very popular. It's now in six languages and its eighth edition and also in the seventies. We've talked about Hannah Rosen before. She said, there were other groups that, um, we're a little a little more hip. Yeah. Then the the L L right that came out, and

she said, notably one in Boston. Do you know the name of this one? I don't know that they had a name they had They created a sort of a move it. Yeah, they wrote a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves, right, and that was that was basically the foundation for what she calls the second wave of lactivism. Yeah, and she said they were just she said, quote were more groovy types than the L L L moms, h slashy jeans, clogs, bandana's,

holding back their waist, lenked hair. She said, but the two movements grew out of the common frustration and anger of this condescending medical establishment, this paternalistic, non informative, judgmental group of men basically who are just like, just do what we tell you, you don't need to ask questions. This trust that pretty much in these groups came out and said, you know what, um, these are our bodies and our decisions. I don't think beer aids and milk production.

They so they took their um there well, I guess they're they're womanly art of breastfeeding, and they they they kept it, they took it back, they young to back. And so the lacktivism has always had this kind of tinge of the moral authority because of the religious roots of the Light Cha League and radicalism because it was um. Both waves came counter to the medical establishment at the time. So there's a lot of um. A lot of current

understanding of breastfeeding is not necessarily based on accurate scientific information. Right. Yes, we already talked about how the benefits of breastfeeding are fairly relative, but there's also a lot of like misinformation or misunderstanding about how like what breastfeeding and breast milk

can do for a developing baby. Yeah, there's a lot of correlative effects that it's tough to put the hard science behind because um, as Hannah Rosen says, it's tough to do us really ideal study because what you would have to do for it to stand up to scientific rigor would be to divide up two groups of mothers and say you breastfeed, you don't, and then measure the outcomes for years. And you can't do that. You can't tell a woman not to breastfeed for the sake of

this study. So what they end up doing is they just look at observational studies where they look at differences in the two populations over the years. And this is where you get that that skewed perception, or where you can get a skewed perception because they may be looking

at us mothers of a certain social strategy. Well, yeah, there's all sorts of confounding factors that are variables, right that that you know, women who tend to breastfeed these days again tend to be um from a wealthier family, so they make maybe you can stay at home more, or they have more money available for preventative healthcare measures.

There's a lot of other things that could be accounting for these better health outcomes that studies have found but have been able to say, yes, this is directly because these babies were breastfed. The problem is is that these studies that say, hey, these breastfed babies had these amazing um increases in i Q. That's what gets reported through lazy scientific reporting, and it hits the popular media and then all of a sudden, that's gospel fact. And if

you don't breastfeed your baby, You're a horrible mom. Yeah. This In two thousand seven, the World Health Organization UH did a survey of all this literature and they looked at these the big five claims about benefits of breastfeeding lowers cholesterol, lowers blood pressure, lowers risk of obesity, lowers

risk of type two diabetes, and increases cognitive ability. And they didn't find a lot of hard scientific support for one through four, but they did see, like you said that, UM, there was a correlation between an increase i Q right, but they found it was a relatively small increase. But if you're one of those like dog eat dog and role my kid in preschool before she's even born type of parents, you'd be like, I'll take those extra five i Q points. Sure. Yeah. UM. So this is part one.

Uh but before we go, Chuck, do you have anything else? Uh? You know what for part one? Just since we talked about breastfeeding at work and stuff, UM, I feel like we would be remiss if we dot did not mention um. Donald Trump remember that in two about five years ago, he was in a deposition and one of them opposing attorneys, Elizabeth Beck, went to UM went to pump okay, breast milk in this deposition. And he got up and said, uh, you're disgusting. You're disgusting, and he got out of the room.

And this was a very I can't believe you don't remember. This was a huge deal or a huge deal. And um, what she says, Um Elizabeth Beck from her side said, you know he called me. You know, there's nothing disgusting about this. He can't say that to a woman who is breastfeeding or pumping or doing whatever, no matter where it is. And then um Trump and his uh general counsel, Um what was his name, Alan Garton, they contend like, sure, he said she was disgusting, he said, but like they

didn't deny that. They said, but that this is not about breastfeeding. They said that she was in a deposition, right in the middle of a deposition. This is a quote, attempting to breastfeed, to pump in the middle of a deposition with five lawyers, and was not excusing herself. And he claimed that Beck orchestrated the stunt because she ran out of questions, didn't know what to do, and so she just like pulled this breast pumping move. Uh, the old breast pump um. So you know, those are the

two sides of the story. I'm not going to comment one way or the other other than saying you should never use the word disgusting when a woman is bread, breastfeeding, or pumping or anything. He said, I'm gonna be president one day, and she was like, you're not, Like, I don't care what the circumstance. Don't say that even if you if you think it's inappropriate. I'm not even gonna say whether you know, I'm not even weigh in on that. But if if you think it's inappropriate, then you say, hey,

maybe I think this is inappropriate. Don't say you're disgusting, not not right. I agree this is political as I'm gonna get on this one, and that is feeding your baby Part one. Man, this one is a robust. Yeah that's just part one. Uh so be sure to join us for part two. Do we have a listener mail or these things so thoroughly conjoined that they can't be separated by listener mail? Yeah, let's uh, let's skip the

listener maail on this one. Okay, good idea. All right, we'll join us for How feeding Babies Works Part two. Come and at you soon and in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email. The Stuff podcasts at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you

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