Questions about fore/hind milk...

[LadyOfWaffle]

Is the foremilk 'measured' in length of time (ie lasts 10 mins), volume or change of sucking action?

Is it very important they get both seperatly - was wondering if there are any differences in giving EBM ie. all mixed up. Or could you express fore and hind seperate? Could you even tell?

This is just curiousity, I am not doing pumping experiments

LadyofWaffle, best source of info and explanation about this is on www.kellymom.com

It is not worth worrying about. These are not two different sorts of milk, you know The breast makes the same milk all the time. The more watery components trickle down to the front of the breast inbetween feeds, and the fattier components stick to the storage cells, coming 'down' when the baby sucks....the emptier the breast, the fattier the milk, and the fuller the breast the more watery the milk. It's got nothing to do with time (despite what some ill-informed baby book authors say), nothing to do with sucking, either.

Babies do not (and actually cannot) get the milk 'separately' - as the feed progresses, the milk changes gradually, and if the gaps between feeds are very short the baby will get creamier milk(because the breast is emptier) and if the gaps between are long he will get watery-er milk.

Some women do see a difference when they pump as the milk changes. Some don't.

When I used to express, after a few hours, there was visibly a creamy layer on top, which I guess was the hindmilk.

I used to give a small 'swirl' to mix it up again (and often, the creamier parts always got 'stuck' to the inside of the bag and I wanted to make sure DS got those bits!)

Thankyou TIKTOK, makes sense now! I am glad you said about feed gaps because I was going to ask , as my DS has loads of breaks, how long before it becomes foremilk again but I think I can 'feel' what you mean, I tend to put him back on the semi empty one if its been about a 10 min break.

Remeber also that a breast is never more than around 2/3 empty and milk is made all the time .

In answer to your expressing question, if you were to express immediately after a feed and compare it with milk expressed when baby hasn't fed for several hours then the difference would be noticable. The former would appear creamier in colour and the other whiter or even bluish. If left to stand, the layer of fatty milk on the top of the former would be much thicker than the latter. However, this is nothing more than a curious observation really. It makes no difference which you feed as EBM, whether you mix different expressions etc. As tiktok says, a mother's milk changes all the time, throughout a feed and at different times of day. Even the antibodies etc will change from day to day. So if anyone's expressing milk to feed back to there baby, then this is not something to worry about!