Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck

Author:Nina Planck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

PR O - LIFE

Probiotics—meaning “pro-life”—are the good bacteria in your body and in real food. They populate the gut, where they aid digestion, produce neurotransmitters, and boost immunity, among other tasks. Gut flora are astonishingly productive workers. They create energy by breaking down the food you eat. They produce vitamin K2 and B vitamins. They keep the gut wall healthy. They train your immune system to identify and kill invaders. Many pathogens meet their maker in the gut before they make trouble in the rest of the body.

Though you can buy probiotics, the food business didn’t invent these helpful little animals. The beneficial strains of Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli occur naturally in raw milk, real yogurt, raw milk cheese, sauerkraut, and other traditional cultured and lacto-fermented foods. Probiotics contrast with antibiotics, which kill off pathogenic bacteria, and good ones, too. That’s why you eat yogurt or take supplemental probiotics along with a course of antibiotics.

Lactobacillus and company are your friends. But these organisms are amateurs, mere bit players in health, compared with breast milk. When your baby is born, her immune system and digestive tract are immature. Breast milk doesn’t merely give your baby’s immune and digestive systems a helpful boost. It creates and finishes them.

In your womb, the baby’s digestive tract is largely sterile. A trip down the birth canal begins to populate the baby’s skin, ears, nose, throat, and gut with the right bacteria. As we’ve seen, cesarean babies miss out on this handy infiltration of good flora. But there is a backup plan. Your first milk, called colostrum, is a slightly thick, yellowish fluid which gathers in your breasts in late pregnancy. The rest of your milk doesn’t come in until a few days after there’s a baby to feed. Colostrum populates her gut with the right bacteria, including Bifidus flora. Even a small amount of formula, or any other foreign food, reshapes the bacterial village in the wrong fashion, so that within twenty-four hours it resembles the bacteria in an adult stomach, leaving your baby more vulnerable to infection.1 Once the baby is back on breast milk, it takes two to four weeks to restore the right bacteria.

You don’t find Bifidus flora in formula.

Some of the sugars in human milk, called oligosaccharides, are indigestible to the baby, but they are meat and drink to the good bacteria in her intestines. At least 130 known oligosaccharides, often called pre-biotics, take up residence in the gut, feeding the good guys. They also pass through it, heading for the respiratory tract, where they fight viral, bacterial, and protazoan parasite infections by preventing pathogens from binding to the baby’s tissues.

You don’t find oligosaccharides in formula. Or rather, when you do, they fail to have the same desirable effects—that is, they don’t feed Bifidus flora. Researchers who figured this out said, “Human milk oligosaccharides remain one hundred and thirty reasons to breastfeed.”2

Your baby’s little colon is full of greenish or black sticky stuff called meconium. It doesn’t move easily, but colostrum flushes it right out.

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