Colostrum, Foremilk and Hindmilk

The contents and composition of breast milk dynamically change to meet your baby’s individual needs at any particular point in time. But there are basically three different types of breast milk: Colostrum, foremilk, and hindmilk.

Colostrum

At some point during your second trimester, you might notice small amounts of a yellowish substance leaking from your breasts. That substance is colostrum.

Colostrum is the first type of milk your body produces during pregnancy. When your baby is born, your body begins producing colostrum for the first few days before normal lactation starts. Colostrum is chock full of antibodies and nutrients for your newborn child. This makes it nature’s perfect food for your baby’s first few days of life.

If you want to increase your baby’s chance at a good and healthy start in life, breastfeeding during those early days gives your baby an opportunity to benefit from the nutrients and antibody protections available in colostrum. And if you have questions or aren’t sure about how to begin, see if your hospital or birth center has a lactation consultant to help you get off to a great start.

Foremilk

Foremilk is the watery milk produced when your baby starts a nursing session. It is generally thin and has a lower fat content than the hindmilk that follows it. Foremilk primarily satisfies your baby’s liquid needs.

Hindmilk

HIndmilk is the thicker milk that follows foremilk during a nursing session. It is much richer in fat content than foremilk, and it has a higher calorie content. This increase in fat and calories is incredibly important for your baby’s overall health and developing body.

To help make sure your baby obtains all the benefits from both foremilk and hindmilk, be sure to let your baby drain one entire breast before moving him or her to the other breast during a feeding.

Ways to Stimulate Your Let-Down Reflex While Pumping

Stimulating a let-down or milk ejection reflex in a reasonable amount of time is one of the biggest challenges facing moms who pump. It might come as a surprise to learn that effectively using a breast pump to express milk can be a learned skill.

It helps to understand the physical science of expressing milk. It takes more than just suction alone for breast pumps and your baby to remove milk from your breast. Stimulation to your breast and breast compression, particularly around the areola and nipple, send a message to your body that causes the muscles within the breast to contract, thereby ejecting milk in what’s commonly known as “let-down.”

The technology behind breast pumps is constantly improving, but your body can still tell the difference between a breast pump at work and a nursing baby. If you can develop associations between your let-down and external stimuli and cues (things you can control), you can improve your body’s ability to initiate the let-down reflex even when your baby isn’t nursing (in other words, while you’re pumping).

Essentially, you’ll teach your body to develop a Pavlovian response to certain cues. Dr. Ivan Pavlov conducted research involving the ringing of a bell every time food was presented to a dog. After experiencing this a number of times, the dog would eventually salivate on cue at the mere ringing of the bell. You can develop a similar practice of using cues to essentially program your milk to let down while pumping.

Of course, you’ll want to choose cues that are far more meaningful to you than the running of a bell. You can also choose cues that will serve additional purposes like helping you stay comfortable, relaxed, and hydrated. Incorporating your five senses with your cues of choice will help you too. If you can associate your cues before let-down and at the beginning of your milk ejection reflex, you’ll find their effect to be much stronger. Once you’ve established those cues, you can develop a habit if repeating them in different settings while you’re pumping away from your baby.

Here are a few examples of cues you can use to help stimulate your let-down reflex:

Look at your baby’s picture.

This is a common piece of advice for pumping moms. Some breast pump kits even have a transparent pocket for you to put a picture of your baby. You can also have pictures of your baby framed and placed around your regular pumping area. Or just look at the many pictures of your baby you’ve taken on your phone. You know you have a lot!

Use your senses of touch and smell.

Have a blanket or article of clothing nearby that has your baby’s scent on it. You can keep the blanket or clothing in a sealed plastic bag. When you’re ready to start pumping, simply open the bag and touch or smell the clothes to get a reminder of your baby’s scent.

Hydrate yourself.

Have a healthy drink, like water or juice, in the same cup or sports bottle whenever you nurse. But watch out for caffeine, as it can increase fussiness in your baby.

Associate the same space and location with breastfeeding and nursing.

If you’re pumping at home, do your pumping in the same room and the same chair where you most often breastfeed your baby.

Use your breastfeeding pillow. 

Bring out your breastfeeding pillow (the kind you wear around your waist or simply place in your lap) when you’re feeding your baby. When you decide to pump, use the breastfeeding pillow to support your back or help support your bottles.

Observe your baby while he or she is nursing.

Take mental pictures of your baby’s jaw movements as they nurse. Pay attention to his or her fast suckling pattern at the start of the nursing session and the longer draws as the milk begins to flow. Associate these images with rhythms of your breast pump while you’re expressing milk.

Enjoy some music.

Listen to music while you nurse. Create a breastfeeding playlist. Or you can even sing or hum a tune.

Experiment with different cues and determine which one (or more) works best for you. Through practice and repetition, you may find that it gets better and easier over time. Eventually your ability to initiate your let-down while pumping may become second nature.

Breastfeeding Benefits Babies, Moms, and Society Too

A pair of substantial mammary glands have the advantage over the two hemispheres of the most learned professor’s brain in the art of compounding a nutritive fluid for infants. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

So what’s the Big Deal about Breastfeeding?

There are a number of controversial topics when it comes to parenting: sleeping arrangements and whether or not to sleep train your baby, rice cereal or oatmeal, purees or baby led weaning, and even debates on how to give birth. Why is that? Well, everyone has their own individual parenting style. And no one wants to feel like they’re doing less for their child.

But there’s one controversy that boggles the mind, and that’s breastfeeding.

Somehow American society has managed to take a natural biological process designed to nourish babies and turn it on its head.

Over time, somehow breastfeeding became less about feeding babies and more into a topic for debate. As a result, breastfeeding moms in the United States largely lack the support they need and deserve.

So the question today becomes this: How do we get to a place where breastfeeding is normalized, celebrated, and visible without judgment in society?

It starts with education about why breastfeeding matters. Specifically, why it should matter to you.

A healthy start for babies and benefits for moms and society, too.

Breastfeeding a baby is a universal and basic act of nurture, providing significant benefits for mothers, their babies, and even society.

The ability to breastfeed is a beautiful gift in itself. It helps mothers and babies bond, and it offers vital benefits to the health of both mothers and their babies.

Benefits for Babies

A growing body of scientific literature substantiates the medical benefits of breastfeeding.

Breast milk is a live substance that is specially and uniquely made to meet an individual baby’s nutritional needs. It also has unmatched immunological and anti-inflammatory properties that help protect babies against a number of diseases and illnesses.

Studies show that breastfed babies have lower instances of:

•        Allergies;
•        Asthma;
•        Bacterial and viral infections;
•        Childhood leukemia and other cancers;
•        Developmental delays;
•        Diabetes;
•        Diarrheal diseases;
•        Ear infections/Otitis media;
•        Eczema;
•        Meningitis;
•        Obesity during childhood;
•        Respiratory illnesses requiring hospitalization; and
•        Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

Studies also suggest a positive correlation between breastfeeding and a child’s intelligence quotient.

On the other hand, exclusive formula feeding has been associated with higher instances of common childhood infections. Formula-fed infants also demonstrate higher instances of more serious diseases like lower respiratory infections and leukemia. And the risk of SIDS is more than 50% higher among infants who have never been breastfed.

Benefits for Moms

Studies show that breastfeeding offers many protections to mothers, as well.

Breastfeeding is associated with increases in maternal protection from:

•        Breast cancer;
•        Osteoporosis;
•        Ovarian cancer;
•        Postpartum depression; and
•        Urinary tract infections.

When it comes to breast cancer in particular, studies have shown that the breast cancer rate in the United States could decrease by an impressive 25% if every mother would breastfeed her children for at least two years.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), about 1 out of every 9 mothers experience postpartum depression. Studies have suggested that women who breastfeed—particularly women who breastfeed for a longer duration—may have lower instances of postpartum depression. Some women have expressed a significant psychological benefit from breastfeeding, describing a very close bond between themselves and their babies.

Benefits for Society

There’s little doubt that the health benefits of breastfeeding mentioned above, which are only a partial list, result in direct economic benefits to society. When mothers and children experience fewer health problems, this leads to reduced medical expenses. And for parents who work outside the home, fewer medical issues leads to fewer days of missed work–helping employers as well.

Worldwide Recognition

The World Health Organization and UNICEF set the encouragement of breastfeeding as a primary goal. Both recommend that mothers breastfeed for at least two years, but the vast majority of mothers in the U.S. do not continue breastfeeding as recommended.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Surgeon General of the United States also recognize the role of breastfeeding in helping infants attain a healthy and optimal start in life. Both recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed their infants be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months, with continued breastfeeding for at least 1 year (alongside the introduction of complementary foods) unless medical reasons prohibit it.

Breastfeeding Still Isn’t Normalized

So one would think society should encourage breastfeeding in the best interests of both the mother and the child, right?

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Breastfeeding became an unusual and uncommon choice during most of the last century—largely as a result of poor advice and discouragement to American mothers.

Thankfully, recent decades have brought with them a turnaround. Mothers, their families, supporters, and health care providers have started to realize and embrace the benefits of breastfeeding. As a result, the number of breastfeeding mothers in the United States is increasing. More than three-quarters of newborns in the U.S. begin now their lives breastfeeding.

Obstacles Remain

Despite this improvement, breastfeeding mothers and their babies continue to face obstacles to breastfeeding far too often. And while a large number of babies are initially breastfed upon birth, the numbers for continued breastfeeding show that our society still has work to do in our efforts to normalize breastfeeding.

According to the Center for Disease Control’s 2016 Breastfeeding Report Card, slightly more than half of U.S. women are still breastfeeding at six months. These rates drop significantly thereafter, with only about 30% of women still breastfeeding at twelve months.

Unfortunately, social limitations tend to weigh against the decision to breastfeed. Differing opinions about breastfeeding can understandably make some women uncomfortable nursing in public areas.  As a result, new mothers may be inclined to choose formula over breastfeeding simply to avoid situations where they may feel intimidated, excluded, or ostracized in public.

In addition, mothers who work outside the home are one of the fastest growing groups in the workforce. Until President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, there was virtually no federal protection for mothers who need to breastfeed or otherwise pump milk during their work day. The ACA set forth requirements stating companies with greater than 50 workers to provide (1) adequate break time and (2) adequate space for certain employees to express breast milk at work.

The ACA also required insurers to provide coverage for mothers to obtain breast pumps and lactation support services. But women are still faced with situations where their employers cannot or do not afford them an adequate place to express breast milk.

Moving Forward

Ultimately, the fact that breastfeeding numbers continue to rise tells us that most mothers in the U.S. want to breastfeed and are at least willing to try. However, low rates for breastfeeding at six months and beyond demonstrate that breastfeeding for the recommended time frames remains uncommon in the U.S.

Mothers need support in order to help themselves and their babies reach the recommended breastfeeding goals.

Breastfeeding should be encouraged so that no mother feels intimidated, excluded, or ostracized for breastfeeding her baby, whether in public or in private.

Employers must work harder to create breastfeeding-friendly environments for mothers who return to work outside the home.

Significant others, family members, friends, healthcare providers, and others must help facilitate a supportive environment for breastfeeding mothers and their babies.

Doing so can help improve the overall health of the entire nation.