Your Maternal Milk is Amazing
Your maternal milk is amazing and clever. Maternal milk is like a natural medicine; it contains antibodies which can provide passive immunity for your baby. Protecting baby by preventing or postponing illnesses.
You yourself could be ill and catch a virus but your baby could remain quite healthy.
Here is my story about how I realised just how amazingly powerful maternal milk is:
My son must have been in his fifth month when I caught the norovirus. A terrible virus that makes you vomit and have diarrhea for days on end.
I was breastfeeding my son almost fully, I had only just started weaning him. The norovirus kept me ill for a long week. It was impossible to keep any food down. I had to resort to drinking lemonade to give my body some energy. The virus left me feeling incredibly weak and tired, terrified that I would pass it on to my baby. If I was finding it so hard to cope with the virus, how would a tiny baby cope?
He never caught the virus. I was so thankful. My instinct told me that my breastmilk had protected him. It was then that I realised how powerful breast milk is.
After this happened, I conducted some research on the internet to find out if it really was my maternal milk protecting him. From what I read, it has been clinically proven.
Why Maternal Milk Protects Your Baby Against Illness
- In short, the mother’s body builds up immunity according to her surroundings – so whatever the mother comes in to contact with gets transformed inside her body with active antibodies. These antibodies are completely specific to what the mother has encountered in her surrounding environment. This process does not yet work in a young baby.
- Maternal milk contains a high concentration of antibodies. These are transferred to the breastfed baby, therefore protecting baby for the time that she is breastfed.
- New clinical research even suggests that immunity is passed on by the mother’s cells and not the antibodies. These cells could in fact provide a lifelong immunity. Not as originally thought via antibodies, which provide only short-term immunity.