If your Baby couldn't Digest Milk from Breast Feeding, would it still do any Good?
Do you remember the first time you ever heard of how invisible dark matter constituted most matter in the universe? If you are like me, it probably made you look around nervously to see if the mystery matter would pop out of nowhere and do something to you. Recent research into breast-feeding finds something quite startling - most of what is contained in mother's milk is indigestible. But that's a bit vague, isn't it? Everyone's always assumes that breast milk was all goodness all the time. What does this new scrap of information mean then that says that breast milk is mostly indigestible?
As always, the scientists who call common wisdom into question have an explanation - the purpose of the indigestible parts is to change the way bacteria inhabit your baby's food passage, from top to bottom. It was a bunch of scientists at UC Davis who found out about how breast-feeding does much more than help your baby get the nutrition she needs. It all comes down to a very specific kind of bacterium. It goes by the name Bifidobacterium longum. This little critter simply loves the part of breast milk that your baby can't digest. Does it help though you ask? Well, it's like nitrogen - it helps your baby, but without actually helping her.
Bacteria apparently have a rule - they like to respect territory. Where one kind of bacteria thrives, other bacteria don't come a-calling. The large quantity of indigestible stuff in mother's milk that only these special bacteria can digest, helps them really thrive in baby's body. And when there are so many of them around, they actually form a coating along your baby's insides, and the other bacteria, the bad ones, know it when they are overwhelmed. They just don't come around anymore. Baby gets seeded with the bacteria by mother; but scientists never ever found grown-up women to have any of this bacteria in their bodies. They just wonder now where in a mother's body it could hibernate.
If you're wondering what the digestible parts of mothers milk is exactly, it's a kind of sugar. No, it isn't sweet, and it doesn't do anything that the sugar we are familiar with does. It's just a complex molecule that's all over mother's milk, and it's there to attract these harmless bacteria. However, if you haven't guessed already, there is more to this than meets the eye. Apparently breast-feeding completely evolved to help a baby with these bacteria. It doesn't just exist to fill your baby with harmless bacteria though; it also directly fights with viruses and harmful bacteria in addition. How does it do that you ask?
We all have certain complex sugars on the surfaces of our cells throughout. Harmful microbes attack our body by first attaching to these sugars. The sugars in the indigestible part of mothers milk kind of make the harmful microbes think that they are the sugars they are looking for, and once the fooled microbes attach themselves to these, they are completely deactivated. It would appear that the breast itself was evolved to make and send these critters through the body. It's quite a surprise, but it appears that the indigestible part of mother's milk could just be its most useful part. It only makes sense doesn't it? Breast-feeding isn't easy on any mother - it actually takes a lot of of the mother's own nutrients and strength to manufacture milk. And nature isn't about to cost the mother this much if it doesn't really do something useful.
And you know what? They found a way to produce this complex sugar through other ways. And they feel that it could help the elderly with weak immune systems fight infection too.
Pages
▼