Margaret says,
<<It may be a fine point, but "digested more quickly" does not
necessarily mean "baby hungry sooner," does it? I would think that
even though ebm may leave the stomach faster, the perfect balance of
nutrients in ebm might satisfy the baby just as long (talking about
*bottles* of ebm vs. formula here -- certainly feeding at the breast
involves different dynamics).>>
I think that's a good point, Margaret. The other thing is, we don't really
KNOW what causes hunger. There is "mouth hunger" (I just *feel* like eating
something, and a bowl of hot buttered popcorn sounds really good right now), and
"I must be hungry because it is dinner time, so I eat" hunger, and then there
is true stomach hunger. Now it is interesting that we adults are not always
hungry in the same way at the same time every day. There are days where
perhaps you have dinner at 6:00 pm, and then are hungry again at 9:00 so have a
bedtime snack. The next morning you get up and are ravenous for breakfast at
7:00. And there are other days where you have dinner at 6:00, and don't even
think about food until the next day -- and perhaps it is 10:00 in the morning
before you notice that you are really *hungry* and you realize you forgot to eat
breakfast.
So it isn't *just* an empty stomach that signals hunger -- otherwise
breastfed babies would never go beyond an hour and a half or whatever the length of
time is for the milk to leave the stomach, and formula fed babies would never
eat any more often than 3 or 4 hours or whatever time it takes for the formula
to leave the stomach.
No, there must be more to it than that. I suspect we could cut down on adult
obesity if we learned to recognize the difference between mouth hunger and
stomach hunger and acted only on stomach hunger. It would be nice to know if
babies really DO experience *hunger* in the first couple of days of life. I'm
really tired of the nursing staff telling the mother that the baby is STARVING,
and that he is so big (or so small) that the colostrum isn't enough for him.
When do babies experience real *stomach* hunger? I suspect it isn't until
mom's milk has actually *come in* and there is an appreciable amount of fluid in
the stomach so they can sense the difference between full and empty. Of
course, I don't think that's all of it either, but I think we can screw up the
system by feeding babies formula in the first couple of days.
But we all know that.
I'd really like to know what makes a baby feel hungry.
Jan Barger, RN, MA, IBCLC, RLC
Wheaton, Illinois
www.lactationeducationconsultants.com
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