Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Milk Myth

It's time again for Pin Busters!

I seriously have no idea if anyone thinks this is a good idea but me, but hey. If this bores you to sleep, you can just keep waiting for the next post.

So, on pinterest I happened upon this infographic about breast milk. Now, there are a lot of  fact/fictions to deal with there, and I DO NOT want to open up the breast-feeding debate here. Do what's right for you, there.

However, I did find one section of this infographic particularly interesting.

"Breast milk changes during the day. Morning milk helps baby wake up; evening milk helps baby fall asleep."

What the what! I had never heard of something like that before! (And I like to read all kinds of nerdy health facts!) That's almost like, some sort of sci-fi or something!

So I had to investigate. Luckily, the infographic cited a few sources. I found the news article that briefed one doctor's findings about changes in breast milk in the morning and evening, but it was very vague and dumbed down. I'm not dumb!

So, I looked up that source! (I'm almost like a detective now, right?) Which was in the periodical, "Nutritional Neuroscience."

And BYU had it! So I found the article, and this was the title, "The possible role of human milk nucleotides as sleep inducers." And it just got better from there.

Holy big words batman.

After much decoding, I feel fairly confident that I can give you the Chloe-language version of this particular scientific article.

A bunch of scientists got together and took some "human milk samples" and used "capillary electrophoresis," which basically means some awesome science experiment where you shock stuff, to separate the nucleotides (molecules that make up things like DNA) from each other. They then ran tests to find out when these nucleotides were at their peak and found that two of five nucleotides peaked at night while another two of five peaked during the day. They found these results to be statistically significant at a p value of 5%, which basically means they are 95% confident that these findings are accurate (which is a pretty big deal in the science world, from what I can tell).

So what does this all mean?

It means this crazy sci-fi milk myth might be right! This test seems to be pretty strong evidence that there are different nutrients in morning and evening breast milk. If these nutrients effect your baby and by how much, it's hard to say. But at least to the statement, "Breast milk changes during the day," I think I can confidently state that this myth is



Which is pretty neat!

(And personally, if breast milk's genetic makeup changes during the day, it seems to me that this has to affect your baby at least a little bit. Why else would your body do that? Just a personal opinion though.)

So, random breast milk infographic designer, color me impressed. And thanks for citing your sources, too. Makes my work much easier.

Let me know what you think of these posts. Love them, hate them? Want me to research something? Just asking for a little interaction!

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