frozen breast milk or formula?

[btheb]

I have read that frozen breast milk is no better for my 10wo dd than formula. I was a bit surprised and wondered if anyone else knew?

Rubbish! Where the flippity flip have you read that?

Frozen breastmilk is fine and it is identical to 'fresh' except that the antibodies may be slightly affected by the freezing process, though they do survive the process even so. There may be some very slight effect on the fat content but not sufficient to make a difference to the baby's nutrition.

How could it be 'no better than' formula? How would it change from human (breastmilk) to cows (formula) ??? :)

I donate to a hospital milk bank and was talking to them today. All my milk is frozen and they then pasteurise it. Even so they regard it as 'medicine' because of the amazing benefits it has for sick babies in NICU. It costs them about £200/litre to collect (donors don't get paid, that's just for our blood tests, handling and testing the milk etc).

I think that shows that, while as tiktok says fresh is better, frozen is still amazing stuff

Interesting - I had read this too ( not sure where) - great to know its rubbish - makes complete sense - I am going to use this thread as the kickstart I need to get expressing for my return to work freezer stash.

Nonsense. My DD had donor milk for the first two weeks, which came from the freezer in the hospital's human milk bank, at great expense to the hospital. They wouldn't go to such lengths if it was just the same as giving formula.

Just make sure you don't put it in the microwave! Doing so can destroy the antibodies it contains. Warm it with hot water instead.

I don't think that's correct, SomeTeaPlease - do you have a reference for that?

Overheating breastmilk - which is easy enough to do in a microwave - could make it marginally less nutritious, and uneven heating could mean some parts of it overheat and scald the baby.

But destroying antibodies - I would think probably not.

The breast bank coordinator said that the antibodies do survive pasteurisation (though they can be affected) so I suspect you'd have to try quite hard to do much to them accidentally. I don't know what the evidence base is for that though.

Breast -milk- bank A breast bank would be something quite different!

NHS says not to microwave it:

www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/pages/expressing-storing-breast-milk.aspx#close

But for the hot spots reason. I've heard the antibodies thing before but can't find a credible citation in my quick google search.

Better to avoid it, but not the end of the world if it's unavoidable.