A study in the Journal of Pediatrics just put a number and dollar amount on the lives that would be saved if 90 percent of mothers in the United States breastfed their babies. From the Associated Press:

The findings suggest that there are hundreds of deaths and many more costly illnesses each year from health problems that breast-feeding may help prevent. These include stomach viruses, ear infections, asthma, juvenile diabetes, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and even childhood leukemia.

The magnitude of health benefits linked to breast-feeding is vastly underappreciated, said lead author Dr. Melissa Bartick, an internist and instructor at Harvard Medical School. Breast-feeding is sometimes considered a lifestyle choice, but Bartick calls it a public health issue.

Among the benefits: Breast milk contains antibodies that help babies fight infections; it also can affect insulin levels in the blood, which may make breast-fed babies less likely to develop diabetes and obesity.

The analysis studied the prevalence of 10 common childhood illnesses, costs of treating those diseases, including hospitalization, and the level of disease protection other studies have linked with breast-feeding.

The $13 billion in estimated losses due to the low breast-feeding rate includes an economists' calculation partly based on lost potential lifetime wages — $10.56 million per death.

About 43 percent of U.S. mothers do at least some breastfeeding for the first six months of their babies' lives. But only 12 percent follow government guidelines recommending that babies exclusively receive breastmilk for six months.

The lead author of the study, Bartick, made an excellent point that should not go missed. Mothers should not be blamed for not breastfeeding. Instead, workplaces need to accommodate nursing mothers and hospitals need to help out with that initial latch.  

Bartick said there are some encouraging signs. The government's new health care overhaul requires large employers to provide private places for working mothers to pump breast milk. And under a provision enacted April 1 by the Joint Commission, a hospital accrediting agency, hospitals may be evaluated on their efforts to ensure that newborns are fed only breast milk before they're sent home.

The pediatrics academy says babies should be given a chance to start breast-feeding immediately after birth. Bartick said that often doesn't happen, and at many hospitals newborns are offered formula even when their mothers intend to breast-feed.

"Hospital practices need to change to be more in line with evidence-based care," Bartick said. "We really shouldn't be blaming mothers for this."

I hate to be the purveyor of bad news lately, but I have come across a lot of articles on chemicals in breast milk. (Isn't that just maddening?)

First, there was this MomsRising piece on the estrogenic and synthetic chemical bisphenol-A (BPA) in breast milk.

Then I went for a walk with scientist Arlene Blum, who was largely responsible for the feds removing a flame retardant, chlorinated tris, from children's pajamas in the 1970s. Once again, she relayed her concern that flame retardants are in baby's products -- due to California's TB117 flammability standard -- and in even breast milk. Then she sent along a disturbing study that showed that prolonged breastfeeding does not rid a mother's milk of flame retardants and that it is younger women who have higher levels of these toxic chemicals. Read on if you dare:

Breast milk from young women – rather than from women older than 35 – has the highest measured levels of commonly used flame retardants known as PBDEs.

A study of breast milk samples from more than 300 women in North Carolina finds flame retardants contaminate the milk from almost three-quarters of the woman in the study. Women older than 35 had the lowest levels of PBDEs in their milk. The highest levels were measured in breast milk from women aged 25 to 29, followed by women younger than 25 years old.

The results suggest that younger mothers may have higher exposure to these flame retardant chemicals through their environment or lifestyles.

PBDEs are chemicals used in electronics, furniture, carpeting and textiles to reduce the risk of fire. In rats, early life exposures to PBDE has been associated with altered thyroid hormone function, hyperactivity and poorer learning and memory. Human health effects are not so well understood.

Most Americans have detectable levels of PBDEs in their blood. Dust and food may be the biggest sources for people. Breast fed babies are exposed through breast milk, however, experts agree that breastfeeding also provides important nutritional and immune benefits for the infant.

Yes, both the American Academy of Pediatrics and World Health Organization prefer mother's milk to other foods for infants. This study mentioned by the Environmental Working Group suggests that breast milk has nutrients to combat the harmful effects of flame retardants.

Still, I was disturbed that not only is this chemical in breast milk, but even prolonged breastfeeding did not lessen the load. According to the North Carolina study Arlene sent me, "Measured levels in breast feeding mothers a year after they gave birth were not significantly different from their levels when their infants were 3 months old. Having more previous pregnancies was also not associated with lower PBDE levels."

Yikes!

Another weekend has rolled around! Let's take a look at some health and wellness news off the beaten path:

Things that make you go "EEEWW!": A chef at an exclusive Swiss restaurant has raised eyebrows by announcing that he will serve meals cooked with human breast milk.

"We have all been raised on it. Why should we not include it into our diet?" Hans Locher, who has become Switzerland most controversial restaurant owner, said.

Mr. Locher attracted the attention of the leading media of the German-speaking world this week after he posted ads looking for women donors, who will receive just over three pounds for 14 ounces of their milk.

I'm a proud lactivist, but is cooking with boob juice really necessary? Plus, he's a cheapskate. That is all. Your thoughts?

Sistahs are doing it for themselves: Here in Orange County, a local high school is planning to open an on-site day care center after teachers lobbied for the program:

Officials are planning to offer day care and preschool services at Huntington Beach High for children ages 3 to 6 of district staff. Two child care rooms and two outdoor play areas would be in the southwest corner of the high school.

The program would be run by trained child care workers and would be used as a lab for students taking child care development classes.

I think this is brilliant: it's practical and humane. My old employer provided a subsidized day care center just across the street, and it made my transition back to work so much easier to know I could see my daughter whenever I wanted, whether it was to nurse her or just to sneak a snuggle. Have you ever benefited from on-site child care?

I'm a weepy wuss: This CNN story of love and survival made me weepy. A father and his autistic son were swept out into the Atlantic by a rip current, eventually drifted apart and were miraculously rescued the following day:

While Christopher is almost nonverbal in his communication, he and his father use catch phases from Disney movies, which the boy loves, to communicate.

After four hours, the currents picked up, and Christopher began to drift from his father's reach. Because of the darkness, they couldn't see each other. So Marino shouted out part of a phrase to his son.

"To infinity," Marino shouted, referencing one of Christopher's favorite lines from the movie "Toy Story."

"And beyond," Christopher shouted back, pumping his fist in the air like movie character Buzz Lightyear.

The call and response went on for a while, with Marino choosing different phrases and Christopher yelling back. But over the course of an hour, Christopher's voice faded until his father couldn't hear him anymore.

"That's when I resigned myself to the fact that he was gone," Marino told CNN, saying he believed his son had been pulled under the water.

The story has a happy ending, of course. You have to read it to believe it!

From the "I can't believe I'm shocked" files: A study of almost 1,474 kids meals offered by fast food and chain restaurants found that 93% of them exceeded the recommended calorie count for a single meal, which is 430:

For example, Chili's Bar and Grill has 700 possible kids' meal combinations, but 658, or 94 percent, of those are too high in calories. One Chili's meal composed of country-fried chicken crispers, cinnamon apples and chocolate milk contained 1,020 calories, while another composed of cheese pizza, homestyle fries, and lemonade contained 1,000 calories.

I wasn't under the impression that restaurants were serving health food, but I was taken aback by some of these calorie counts. How often do you eat out, and how do you ensure that your child's meals are somewhat healthy?

DD is going off with my parents for the night so DH and I can have a date. I bet it will be romantic to have him push me around in a wheelchair. :-) The cast comes off Oct. 1, but I refuse to stay cooped up. Viva romance!

What's everyone up to this weekend? Do share...

We recently had a diary about a breast milk mix-up at daycare. (Thank you, upstatemom!)

Then I spotted this article in Parenting. Apparently, it is en vogue to "milk share," meaning mothers informally share each other's milk, benefiting especially those who cannot nurse.

In addition to exchanging expressed breast milk, some moms skip the bottle and cross-nurse, splitting breastfeeding duties with another woman and her baby. Cross-nursers say they enjoy the flexibility as well as the four-way bonding that occurs between the moms and their children. And some moms go as far as hiring a wet nurse -- a woman paid to breastfeed another child -- when they can't perform the task themselves. Informal sharing is naturally more controversial, but a significant number of moms are open to the idea. According to a nationally representative Babytalk survey on momconnection.com, 40 percent had either a positive response ("beautiful!") or a neutral reaction ("each to her own") when asked how they felt about milk sharing.

Yet the majority of the medical community warns against it. "We support breastfeeding, but if you can't nurse, we recommend breast milk from a milk bank, or that you use formula," says Ari Brown, M.D., a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics and author of Baby 411. "Even if you have a good friend who wants to donate milk, you can't guarantee that it's free of infections, like HIV. Breast milk is a bodily fluid, just like blood. Would you be willing to give your baby a blood transfusion without first having it tested?"

Bosom Buddies
Why, then, do women potentially risk their little ones' well-being by engaging in informal milk sharing? For starters, the word is out that breast is best: Almost 75 percent of new moms leave the hospital breastfeeding their newborns, and some women are wedded to providing breast milk, even if it's not their own. There's also the issue of supply and demand. A doctor's prescription is required to purchase banked milk, so most of the precious fluid goes to babies with medical needs -- it's not always available to moms with low milk production or adoptive families. Then there's the whopping price tag: Milk banks charge as much as $5 an ounce, and while some insurance plans will cover a percentage of the cost, others don't.

The famous Dr. William Sears actually encourages milk sharing and even sought out donations from friends in his pediatric practice when his adoptive daughter Lauren arrived.

"This is not a back-to-nature, hippie-type movement," he insists. "It's what savvy moms who know the science are doing to ensure that their baby is getting the best.

"When our daughter Lauren arrived, all I could think was, 'She shouldn't be deprived of breast milk just because she's adopted,'" he recalls. Dr. Sears and his wife were no strangers to milk sharing. Prior to Lauren, Martha Sears had occasionally cross-nursed another daughter, Erin, with a mom friend and her son.

A group of scientists have discovered that human breast milk may contain "putative" stem cells. Dr. Mark Cregan, PhD, a professor and researcher at the University of Western Australia, presented his lab’s findings at the 14th Conference of the International Society for Research in Human Milk and Lactation, which this year is held in Perth. (Hey, Aussieyank, are you at this conference?!)

There aren’t a lot of details for me to show you folks, as there doesn’t appear to be any print media coverage of this. I saw a news broadcast of this on Thursday night’s news, but can’t link to anything at the moment. However, the abstract of Dr. Cregan’s presentation is as follows, from the conference’s program:

Putative Stem Cells in Human Breastmilk

Human breastmilk contains a range of bioactive components that have been fine-tuned through evolution to provide the optimum developmental benefits to the newborn infant.  The cells in breastmilk are not clearly understood, but are known to include secretory epithelial cells (lactocytes) that have exfoliated from the alveoli and a range of immune cells activated to specific pathogens. Further, it has been shown that the immune cell component of breastmilk can survive the digestive processes of the infant; whereas animal studies have shown that immune cells from mothers’ milk can be found in the infants’ circulation following feeding.

In a recent study, we cultured cells from human breastmilk and using fluorescent immunocytochemistry and RT-PCR identified a cell population that were positive for the multipotent marker – nestin.  Analysis of the cells isolated from breastmilk using FACS showed there to be a small side population of cells isolated that exclude Hoechst 33342 – a key property of multipotent stem cells, that also stained positive for nestin.   Further, we have also recently observed a side population of cells in breastmilk that exclude Hoechst 33342 and are positive for the hematopoietic stem cell marker, CD133 - suggesting that human breastmilk contains stem cells of multiple lineages.  The presence of putative stem cells in breastmilk demonstrates a more complex cellular component exists in human milk than previously appreciated.  These findings further enhance our appreciation of the bioactivity of breastmilk and also demonstrate that human breastmilk is a readily available and non-invasive source of putative stem cells.  

I don’t pretend to understand the technicals here, but this finding is potentially explosive, and raises so many fascinating questions. For one, why would there be stem cells in breast milk – what are we transmitting to infants with the stem cells? For another, if it’s true that stem cells can be harvested from breast milk, the whole moral debate over using embryonic stem cells can be totally obviated in one stroke and we can focus on the science of stem cell research.

Finally, how cool is it that there seem to be stem cells in breast milk!? The human body is just so awesome. [Standard disclaimer: I make no judgements on breast vs bottle. I breastfed and supplemented with formula. Loved breast feeding. Will hopefully have the opportunity to do it again. But no judgements on somebody else’s choice.]

What do you say, lactating MTs? Would you donate some of your breast milk to stem cell research?