Joy writes,

Nature is so clever - the system is fantastically designed. Problems only
arise when *we* muck up the system in some way.

So true!!  Looking at Nature as "parent" and us as "the children" I am remembering (and approximating) Chairman Mao, who wrote that " it is the role of the children to question the rules of the parents, and rebel against them.  Once they have torn apart the old structure, they rebuild it very similarly, only now they understand why it is so."

Chanita, San Francisco



----------
From:   Joy Anderson[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Tuesday, December 02, 1997 10:02 PM
Subject:        Re: foremilk/hindmilk

>   It is my understanding that as the baby nurses, the foremilk comes first,
>and then becomes a mix of fore and hind, and then becomes just the hind
>milk.  That is why we want a baby to finish one side before going to the
>other, and why we encourage moms with oversupply to feed just on one
>side at a feeding (as well as to help reduce the supply over time).
>
>So if a baby is stopping and starting, over the period of an hour, say, on
>just one side, doesn't he keep getting just foremilk?  Or does he keep
>getting a blend? Does it depend on the length of the breaks he takes? Like
>with every three to four minutes, he might be getting the continuum over an
>hour;  but with every 20 minutes, he keeps getting new supplies of skim or
>skim and  whole without ever getting to the cream?

*****The fat content of the milk available at any one point in time is
dependent on the degree of emptiness of the breast, regardless of *when* in
the feed it is.*****

So when a baby stops feeding, the breast keeps on making milk (at a rate
according to the degree of breast emptiness - the emptier it is, the faster
it synthesises new stuff), so the fat concentration begins to fall
gradually as the breast fills up again. Babies never totally 'empty'
breasts, they stop when they have had enough milk and/or sucking. So the
residual milk (and hence the fat content) left after a baby comes off will
vary greatly from time to time and mother to mother. Also contributing to
this variation is the differing storage capacities in different mothers and
individual breasts on each mother.

There are heaps of posts in the archives about all this. Or even better,
get hold of Peter Hartmann's papers for an explanation of the control of
milk synthesis. He has shown that it is possible in the one mother (one
breast actually) to have the 'foremilk' of one feed (late in the day) with
a higher fat content than the 'hindmilk' of another feed (early morning
after a long sleep). He believes we should stop talking about 'foremilk'
and 'hindmilk' altogether as it is often meaningless.******************************************************************
Joy Anderson B.Sc. Dip.Ed. Grad.Dip.Med.Tech. IBCLC
Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia Breastfeeding Counsellor
Perth, Western Australia.   mailto:[log in to unmask]
******************************************************************