But April Fools is over!

I can't imagine the time difference is that great between here and Europe, so I don't think this is a joke...the EU has ruled that formula makers can claim that their artificial milk is just a healthy as breast milk. Enough with the dark ages...I'm ready for a renaissance already. Read all it about it here.

no more milk

I know it's kind of crazy, but I have not been able to bring myself to throw away the last bag of frozen breast milk...it's WAY expired (since I pumped it in 2005!) but has just been a happy little memento that I would notice every so often when I opened the freezer. Kind of weird, I know. Anyway, today I'm tossing it with a slightly heavy heart...I did, however, get to have a great discussion about breastfeeding with my youngest, since it's really his milk I'm getting rid of.

(Assuming your milk is a bit more current, here are guidelines for storage)

got milk?

In the current (March, p. 197) issue of Oprah's O Magazine is an article on breast milk & milk banking. Entitled, "The Gift", the article is about a woman who has preemie triplets and begins pumping, ultimately donating over 7,000 ounces of breastmilk to a milk bank.  It also talks a lot about why breastmilk is best for babies nutritionally and for all the other reasons beyond nutrition.   This article follows last month's  "Books That Made A Difference" section, (where a celeb tells about what they are reading and why), in which Isla Fisher (Confessions of a Shopaholic) talked about birth and Ina May Gaskin's Guide... 

Why does this matter?  Because Oprah is incredibly influential and is sort of the holy grail in terms of PR...and because she has seemed to avoid birth-related topics much to the consternation of the birth community.  Hopefully this is a trend in the right direction!  

breastfeeding & immunity

Facts about breastfeeding never cease to amaze me...check this new study out, particularly the bolded (by me) paragraph at the bottom:

How Breastfeeding Transfers Immunity To Babies
ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2008) —

A BYU-Harvard-Stanford research team has identified a molecule that is key to mothers’ ability to pass along immunity to intestinal infections to their babies through breast milk.

The study highlights an amazing change that takes place in a mother’s body when she begins producing breast milk. For years before her pregnancy, cells that produce antibodies against intestinal infections travel around her circulatory system as if it were a highway and regularly take an “off-ramp” to her intestine. There they stand ready to defend against infections such as cholera or rotavirus. But once she begins lactating, some of these same antibody-producing cells suddenly begin taking a different “off-ramp,” so to speak, that leads to the mammary glands. That way, when her baby nurses, the antibodies go straight to his intestine and offer protection while he builds up his own immunity.

This is why previous studies have shown that formula-fed infants have twice the incidence of diarrheal illness as breast-fed infants.

Until now, scientists did not know how the mother’s body signaled the antibody-producing cells to take the different off-ramp. The new study identifies the molecule that gives them the green light....
continue reading here