Creamatocrit! What’s really in breast milk?
When babies breastfeed on demand, they adjust their intake to the amount of fat in the breast milk to get exactly what they need.
Breast milk varies widely in its fat content. A 2006 study in Pediatrics followed 71 moms who were exclusively direct breastfeeding their healthy 1-6 month old babies across a total of 775 feeds. The study called the measure they used “creamatocrit”. The fat content varied across these samples from 22g/L (a little less than 2% milk) to 61g/L (higher than whole milk and approaching the fat content of coffee creamer) with an average of 41g/L (a bit higher than whole milk and standard infant formula). As we would hope, the higher the fat content of the milk, the less milk babies drank in a day, and the lower the fat content, the higher volume they drank in a day. The milk fat content varied highly between moms and also in the same mom at the beginning of the feed (lower fat) to the milk at the end of the feed (higher fat) on the same breast.
When babies breastfeed on demand, they adjust their intake to the amount of fat in the breast milk to get exactly what they need. Breastfeeding moms often worry that they don’t know exactly how much breast milk their baby is getting from direct breastfeeding. This study helps show why a healthy breastfeeding baby can safely feed on demand in response to their own hunger cues, even if the quantity of breast milk changes from mom to mom or feed to feed.
In this same study (linked below) that followed 71 breastfeeding moms of infants ages 1-6 months who were exclusively breastfeeding their babies on demand, some other highlights:
Every mom had one breast that produced more than the other
The volume babies ate did not depend if babies took milk from one breast, both breasts or cluster fed in a breastfeeding session.
In babies who cluster fed (ate on one breast, went to the second, then went back to the first) actually took more from the “third breast” than the second. The cluster feeding was not just using mom as a pacifier.
Babies in the study who breastfed overnight were eating for nutrition, not just for comfort. They needed those overnight calories! For the 67% of babies who woke for overnight feeds, 45% of their daily calories came from those feeds.
Link to study here: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/117/3/e387/68590/Volume-and-Frequency-of-Breastfeedings-and-Fat?autologincheck=redirected
