If You Pump Your Breastmilk, Read This First

Nursing and Pumping Milk

Yes, I did pump my breastmilk due to the extreme pain I felt when nursing. Pumping was a good way to control the pain and still give my daughter breastmilk.

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However, this article brings up something I never thought about. Your milk may have natually occurring chemicals called nucleotides which may help your baby sleep. Depending on the time of day you pump or feed, these chemicals are in higher concentration. Read more:

Cristina Sánchez at the University of Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain, and her colleagues looked at the concentrations of 5'UMP, 5'AMP and 5''GMP – the three nucleotides most strongly associated with sleep and sedation – in the breast milk of 30 healthy mothers who had been breast-feeding for at least 3 months. Samples of milk were collected before each feed over a 24-hour period, with between six and eight samples collected per mother.

They found that concentrations of 5'AMP were highest at the beginning of the night, while levels of 5'GMP and 5'UMP increased as the night wore on. These sedatives were found at much lower concentrations in milk expressed during the day.

"It is a mistake for the mother to express the milk at a certain time and then store it and feed it to the baby at a different time," says Sánchez.

from
www.newscientist.com