Diana Cassar-Uhl wrote:
> My concern isn't so much for those babies who can receive banked 
> milk;  obviously, that's the optimal choice for a baby in the hospital 
> who needs a few ounces of supplement to tide him over until his 
> mother's milk comes in, or until he and mother have overcome whatever 
> circumstance is preventing breastfeeding.
>
Well, no, I don't think that's obvious.  What I thought was obvious (and 
the posts of others have made clear is not as obvious as I thought) is 
that for any baby (except galactosemia and a few other very rare 
conditions) human milk, pasteurized or not, from any reasonably healthy 
woman is preferable to any artificial baby milk.  My question was 
whether the unpasteurized was preferable to pasteurized. 

I appreciate the information that others have sent that show that 
pasteurization destroys less of the known beneficial components of human 
milk than I might have though.  How many helpful components that we 
don't yet know about may be destroyed by pasteurization?  As I said, I'm 
still just thinking out loud here, what if the statistics (entirely made 
up, of course) were 1/50 babies given unpasteurized breast milk became 
ill with a disease, but 1/2 babies fed anything else would as adults 
suffer from obesity, diabetes, or heart disease (and wouldn't have 
otherwise)?   How do we balance this?

Christine Bussman

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