Am I misremembering some research done by Nancy Butte's team in Houston
which described that you could "engineer" a higher fat feed by jiggling the
feed frequency? In other words, shortening the feed intervals by feeding
more often produced access to a higher fat content milk at the next feed.
I will go to my files and look this up later, but perhaps others remember
this. I believe Woolridge also suggests this. I share Nikki's admiration
of Hartmann's work. While he is prob.right about not being able to alter
fat within a feed, other work suggests it may be altered BETWEEN feeds. I
don't mean to imply this is a chemical alteration. It would be the result
of mechanical/management changes, ie. timing and freq. of use, thoroughness
of draining. This has clinical implications, obviously, for the slow
gaining infant whose mother perhaps does not understand that you can deliver
the same vol. of milk from the breast in a 24 hr period in 6 or in 10 feeds,
and achieve better growth on with more freq. feeds due to this issue of
higher caloric value of the milk. Check it out for yourself. Look at the
way milk separates in a bottle when you pump a mom who hasn't drained her
breast in hours. It looks thin and has a more diluted fat fraction because
there is so much more foremilk. Reverse the process, and typically pumping
off a recently drained breast gives perhaps a lower vol. of milk, but the
milk will appear creamier, and will have a thicker layer of fat once it
separates out.
Also, the TYPE of fatty acids can be manipulated with diet because mothers
who eat polyunsaturated and those who eat saturated fats reflect this in
their milk. I don't exactly know what the clinical implications of this
might be, altho I guess I feel suspicious about it being good for anyone if
the type of fatty acid reflected comes from an engineered food such as
margarine, which wouldn't occur in nature. Our processed food diets are
about 1 second. ago in terms of evolution. Who knows what such a change
means?
Barbara Wilson-Clay, BSEd, IBCLC
Austin Lactation Associates, Austin, Texas
http://www.jump.net/~bwc/lactnews.html
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