Getting the nutrition of your baby just right is so simple because Mother Nature provides everything that is needed and that comes via the act of breast-feeding. The article below, that you can read on Substack, is one of the best summaries I have ever seen on the topic of breast-feeding.
Here are a few more things to consider:
The quality of a mother's milk is directly influenced by what she eats and drinks. I learned this when milking cows as a young man. When breast-feeding, it is important that her diet includes a rich, and varied intake of fresh, unprocessed fats, oils, vitamins, minerals, and proteins. She must be hydrated and rested. While these may seem obvious, they are often neglected, due to what is the self-explanatory "Rushing Woman Syndrome" and the trend not to prepare meals from fresh, raw sources, but instead, to go for off-the-shelf fast foods. These easy foods often have a lot of carbs, sugar, flavourings, colours, emulsifiers, stabilisers, and preservatives, and excessively processed vegetable oils. They also often have very few essential nutrients. It is worth noting that a healthy brain consists of around 60 percent fat, including cholesterol, so it makes sense to ensure these are in the mother's diet, and richly so. I encourage pregnant and breastfeeding women to have a daily smoothie with lots of fresh and amazing nutrients. They should also take a good multi-vitamin.
What qualifies me to write about breast-feeding?
The Substack article by Marsha Walker refers to the wonderful La Leche League. My dearly departed mother, Maisie, was a very determined woman. Mum helped introduce La Leche to New Zealand during the 1960's. The matrons who dominated the maternity hospitals that were dotted around the country in most of the timber towns of the 50s and 60s, including our home town of Putaruru, frowned upon the League's promotion of breast-feeding, so my impression was that Mum was regarded as being the "enemy". Bottle-feeding with formula was the norm back then, and breast-feeding was not permitted, or strongly discouraged in maternity hospitals. Mum stubbornly breast-fed all six of her children. As a student in 1972, I helped Dr Frances Broad with her data analysis for her ground-breaking research. Her research linked breast-feeding to the brain development of boys, but not for girls. She was the first researcher in the world to explain why boys almost exclusively populated remedial reading classes. Of those boys, when traumatic brain injuries were excluded, all of the boys in the remedial reading programmes included in her study were bottle-fed as babies. Dr Broad, who is sadly no longer with us, has had her research validated many times since. I later had the honour of presenting to the annual conference for the La Leche league on the topic of child nutrition. It goes without saying that breast-feeding was the norm for my own children.
Biology Factoid:
A man can not breast-feed a baby — just saying!
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