The need for food is dynamic.  If a person is to be in positive nitrogen
balance, which is the state in which physical growth occurs, they need to
take in more protein than they burn.  How much someone burns depends on how
active they are and how fast they are growing.

Babies need enough food to fuel activity and growth.  The standards for
growth have long been skewed upward, by the presence of many artificially
fed babies and children in the population whose measured growth was used to
define what is normal.  That is why WHO took the initiative for a
multicenter study with exclusively breastfed children from many different
parts of the world, to produce new growth curves that should reflect how
healthy breastfed children ought to grow.  It was when these curves were
introduced a few weeks ago at a conference on obesity in Britain, that WHO
lamented the harmful effects of using growth curves based on unnaturally fed
children to measure the adequacy of growth in breastfed ones.  

We don't really know how much any given baby needs in one day, or even in
one babyhood, in order to grow normally.  Since babies differ in their
activity levels, the same amount of milk could make one baby roly-poly and
keep another one just barely growing.  The only real way to judge the
adequacy of a child's diet is to look at the bottom line, which is growth.  

The reason it seems not to be necessary for milk production to increase much
after the first few months is that babies' growth rates slow down a lot.
The amount of milk needed to double your birthweight in a few months
continues to be sufficient to maintain growth within normal ranges for
months afterward as well.  If a baby were merely to double its body weight
every two months the entire first year, it would need more milk than it
would be likely to get from one mother and an 8 pounder at birth would weigh
712 pounds on its first birthday.  If a baby continued to grow at the rate
an embryo grows, it would be the size of an aircraft carrier by a year, I
read once somewhere.  Happily, they only reach the size of a beagle or so in
that time, or co-sleeping would present serious challenges, not to mention
simply housing the monsters.

As an aside, it seems that trying to make people get bigger, faster than
they would do it on their own, is a risky proposition.  We don't know all
the answers yet.  It behooves us all to keep updated on the research taking
place in this field because "truth" is changing fast.

If you still don't understand why a growing baby does not need
ever-increasing amounts of milk in order to support normal growth for the
first year, read this post over again until you do.

Yesterday I met a mother who had exclusively breastfed her two first
children for 12 months.  It was her own idea, because she had had asthma
herself.  I was fascinated and questioned her in detail.  Her children are
school age and have had no sign of asthma.  They were entirely healthy in
every way and followed the normal growth curves perfectly for the entire
period of exclusive breastfeeding, moving on to the family diet without
hesitation when they were introduced to it.  Her biggest problem was making
sure the grandparents and aunts and uncles didn't sneak inappropriate foods
into the children when her back was turned; the children were happy with the
status quo.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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