>>Another reason I wanted to write something here was a snippet I learnt a couple of weeks ago while at a talk by Prof Peter Hartmann. It was that a baby's daily milk intake does *not* actually increase with time. I used to give the same sort of explanation as Arly said above - that baby will need an increasing amount of milk and "grow into" the oversupply. Also the concept of "appetite increases" (or what used to be called "growth spurts") also follows this increasing need assumption. In actual fact, when amounts of milk being synthesised in mothers feeding happily growing babies at different ages (same mothers and babies, longitudinal studies) were measured in Peter's research work, the amounts did *not* increase, but remained constant.<< Joy, when I wrote awhile back on the P.H. lecture that I attended, I failed in my efforts of recollection to include this mystery. I distinctly remember sitting there, thinking, "Hey, wait a minute! What about growth spurts?" I stood around forever hoping to ask him more about this, but was never able to talk with Peter directly. IMO, there has got to be a missing link here. We all know about growth spurts. What Peter taught about milk supply and varying storage capacities actually helped me to understand why some mothers notice these spurts as "running out of milk", while other mothers seem to coast right through them. In the meantime, my own experience was an anomaly since I had early oversupply but suddenly "ran out" of milk at the 3 wk growth spurt and needed support to know that I could still make enough. Yes, babies *do* increase their volume of intake. In fact, I believe that there are also studies of how mother's supplies increase to a peak around 6 months, then plateau, then gradually decline as solids are introduced and begin to replace the milk. It makes perfect sense to me! We know that a 6 lb baby is going to need less milk than a 12 lb baby. The only other possible variable is the actual caloric (fat?) content of the milk. Breastmilk is said to have an avg caloric value of 67kcal/100ml. But, I know that the milk that I donated for a baby 11 yrs ago "had to be diluted because it was too rich". Also: it has been noted by some that Australian women complain more of "oversupply" problems while north American women complain more about "undersupply"; could this observation, which we have loosely tied to opposite hemispheres, be true more for one half of the world than the other? We need more research on these variations! -Lisa Marasco, LLLL, IBCLC [log in to unmask]@slonet.org