Foremilk & hind milk, morning & evening milk.. Fact or old wives' tales?

[UntamedShrew]

Just curious really. Does anyone know of any research into different 'types' of breast milk, surely it has been done? We know the calorie content of every food on the market but not this fantastic free one, if not! So surely some nutritionist out there has analysed it but I must be googling badly as can't find any answers.

I've been told that hind milk is much fattier, so feed off one side for longer so the baby can get to this? Is this proven? Would love to know how big the difference is.
I tandem fed my twins last time so they only ever had one side each. This time I've got a single baby who fusses a bit and likes to swap sides. All 3 kids grew at the same rate - so far, at least.

Also lots of people say morning milk is richer, so last time around I expressed a lot in mornings ready for their 'dream feed' bottle. This time around I do what I can in mornings but I've 3 under 3 so you can imagine what our mornings are like! I make it up in the evenings when they're all supposed to be in bed but wonder if this makes a less satisfying bottle for DD.

Anyway, didn't mean to waffle on about my own circumstances - like I said just curious about any nutritional research into breast milk.

Interesting question - I found this.
Not quite sure what terminology would be used in actual scientific journals...

There isn't really such a thing as fore milk or hind milk, milk sitting in a breast for a length of time starts to lose it's fat as the fat sticks to the walls of the ducts, this fat is ejected with further let downs making the milk appear fattier.

There is a slight change in the amount of sleep inducing hormones in the evening/night compared to daytime but not really any other changes (or yet to be discovered!).

Milk gets fattier as the baby gets older, one study found milk reached around 11% for mums who had been lactating for 12m+.

There is one flaw in studying BM - how do we know the milk that is expressed for testing is the same as the milk that the baby gets when fed direct? We already know that dripped milk isn't the same as expressed milk and that you can get more fattier milk by hand expressing post-pumping but there is no way of knowing if there is any difference between milk that has been expressed and milk that is drunk straight from the breast.

i cant remember the link but recently (and probably via a thread on here) I have seen a link to the calorifc value / nutritional / fat content of breast milk.

It was in the context of weaning and interesting to note that breast milk had more fat / calories than formula per unit (and more than every other food on the list)

I think I read something similar nannyl, maybe on kellymom? Or it might have been the blw website possibly. Listed different foods and their calorific content. I'll have a look and see if I can find it.

I think the general consensus is not to worry about the fore/hindmilk thing, not that it's a myth, just not something you need to worry about/engineer. Your baby sorts this out for themselves if they are allowed free access to bm as and when they need it.

I found this on kellymom about milks.

It's a bit heavy on the sciencey language but here is a constituent breakdown, compared to formula milk.

And this comparing different foods with milk.
HTH

yes tittybo... thats what i was thinking of

This study is great at explaining how it all works:

thefunnyshapedwoman.blogspot.com/2011/05/foremilk-and-hindmilk-in-quest-of.html

Really interesting, thank you all

I found a couple of things too about morning vs. evening milk, none of which supported the received wisdom that your morning milk is richer than evening.. Would link but I'm on silly phone, sorry.

One of the source papers cited in the kelymom article (asklenore.com) was fascinating too if you're interested. Very thorough and shows, among other things, that the mother's diet & fluid intake have little impact other than potentially if a short term very high protein diet is followed.

I didn't find anything about tiredness / energy levels - does anyone know anything or have an opinion here? I've been told repeatedly that I won't have as good milk as last time because I'll be more tired running around after the older kids. That kind of makes intuitive sense but I'm starting to think common sense goes out the window with this wonder-stuff, given calories in has no effect on calories out!

foremilk is went milk starts to flow,hindmilk at "letdown" or when baby can gulp furiously!

i think the quality of milk isnt all due to what we eat/drink/do-some off it is taken from our body reserves and will drain these(like in pregnancy-not enough calcium?meh baby nicks it from your bones)

eating sugar balancing snacks(nuts and seeds,oaty things,crackers fruit and cheese etc) does help keep you going longer but chocolate biscuits in the middle of the night are so much more appreciated

i think from 2nd pregnancys onwards resting is rarely an option(unless bigger ones are at school and home ones nap) so we just plod on and like the sleepless nights,wait for it to pass

i did a course on BF.was very informative and makes you really appreciate what an amazing thing our bodies are naturally capable of.just looking after ourselves as best we can HAS to be enough and then we press on regardless!

p.s i have 4 kids(all single pregnancies) and they all thrived despite me being tired looking like a zombie

good point live in a zoo

having studied my family tree many of my ancestors were 1 of 9 -14 kids, born with not much more than a years ish gap between them.... i cant imagine my great great .... grandmothers were anything other than exhausted, there would have been no formula, so they MUST have been breast fed... and (most of them) survived

They probably were not breastfed for long, nannyl. There have always been alternatives to breastfeeding and in the last 150-200 years, there was less and less breastfeeding. Almost all babies had some breastmilk, of course (unless they were wetnursed which is something only the upper classes did in Britain - it was also not uncommon in Europe among the middle classes). But they would have other foods as well from a fairly early age. Babies would have cereal with water and/or milk; boiled or raw milk; various slops and paps and gruels. Obviously not a good thing :(

Mothers having children a year apart over a period of time (I mean not as a 'one off') are highly unlikely to have breastfed exclusively or for long. Of course some of the short gaps are the result of the babies dying :(

Here's a really interesting article in the New Scientist about breastfeeding in 18th and 19th centuries.

Gosh tiktok i was already a wreck after watching One Born Every Minute and now I'm clutching DD to me very tightly after reading your post. Very sad reminder. My granny was 1 of 12, another 'baby a year' family. She definitely remembered her mother feeding one or two of the younger ones.

Zoo I'm loving "blood turning into milk" - I never thought of it like that before!