"Mother's milk: food for smart children"
This is the headline from the "USA Today" on February 2, 1992.Although numerous studies have shown that breastfeeding stimulates development, this was mainly explained by care and attention, rather than by the properties of the milk itself. But one new study proves that it is mother's milk, and not( or in addition to) the process of breastfeeding, which gives an advantage in development. English researchers divided three hundred premature babies into two groups: one received breast milk, and the second one did not. Preterm infants who received breast milk in the first four to five weeks of life, at the age of seven and a half to eight years, scored an average of 8.3 points in the IQ tests. This study also indicates a direct quantitative dependence: the more mother's milk they received, the more children scored in glasses. The difference can not be attributed to greater care and attention, as infants were given breast milk through the tube. Why breastmilk cultivates the best minds is not yet fully known, but researchers explain it by the influence of hormones and growth factors that are absent in artificial mixtures, as well as special fats that contribute to the structural development of the nervous system. Breastmilk contains approximately four hundred nutrients, which are not found in artificial mixtures. To give a good starting impetus to the intellectual development of your child, one does not find better milk for the growing brain than breast milk. Breastfeeding is really great!
mother is poor in these fats, the mammary glands produce these fats and fill them with milk, as if they say: "If the mother does not eat it, we will do it."
Cholesterol: useful or harmful for a child? The next important component of the family of fats is cholesterol. Is this vital fat the monster that depicts it? Only not for children. Like other fats, cholesterol promotes brain growth and supplies the main components of hormones, vitamin D and bile. The level of cholesterol is high in human milk, low in cow's milk and almost zero in dry mixtures. Recent studies have shown that in the first year of life, children who receive exclusively breast milk have a higher cholesterol level in the blood than children receiving dry mixes. The higher cholesterol level in the blood at the stage of the fastest growing brain is not bad! Nutritionists are indecisive about what is more dangerous - the possible impact of cholesterol-poor milk on the brain of a baby who is showing up soon, or the possible consequences for the heart, which will make themselves felt many years later. For our children we choose the oldest and most successful model of nutrition - human milk for human babies.
Powerful proteins
If the facts about fats are not enough to convince you that your milk is special, listen to a story about proteins( proteins).Proteins are bricks for a growing body. Quality protein is most important in the first year of your child's life, because during this period the child grows faster than in any other period. Your milk contains proteins specially created for the development of human offspring. These powerful, growth-promoting substances can not be developed or purchased. Each of these special substances benefits your child.
Milk( cow made from a dry mixture or human) contains two main proteins: whey and casein. Serum is a delicate protein, easily digested and very well absorbed by the human intestine. Casein - the protein from which the cottage cheese is made - is denser and heavier, and it is more difficult for the human intestine to digest it. Your milk contains mainly serum. Cow's milk and some mixtures contain mainly casein. The intestine of your child recognizes the proteins of your breast milk as the right foods. He assimilates these nutrients easily, digests them quickly and does not reject them as foreign substances. Not so readily
takes the intestines of foreign proteins from mixtures or cow's milk, because it has to work more hard to digest heavier cottage cheese. The intestine is the dietary goalkeeper of our body, letting in the blood the right proteins and not letting into the blood proteins that can cause harm to the body - the so-called allergenic proteins, or allergens. In the first months of your gut life, your child is more porous;The "gate" in the lining mucous membrane is open, which allows foreign proteins to penetrate them. Towards six months, the intestine ripens and the gates begin to close, selectively passing some proteins and tearing others away - a fascinating process called closure. To give your child exclusively their own breast milk, while the intestines do not ripen, is the most reliable way to protect the blood of your child from potentially allergenic proteins.
In addition to whey, your milk contains other selected proteins that are not naturally found in milk produced by cows or companies. Let's get acquainted with this elite. Taurine, is a brain protein that improves, as it is believed, the development of the brain and nervous system. Lactoferrin - is another protein found only in human milk;it acts as a ferry, transporting
valuable iron from your milk into the blood of your child. This particular protein also protects beneficial bacteria that live in your baby's intestines. In the entire lower part of your baby's bowels, useful and harmful bacteria live. Good, useful bacteria in exchange for what they are given a habitat, do your child good, for example, produce vitamins. Disease-causing bacteria, if released from control, can over-multiply in the intestinal tract, causing diarrhea. In addition to the fact that lactoferrin inhibits the growth of pathogenic bacteria in your baby's intestines, it also holds a yeast-like fungus Candida, , which secretes toxins. Another group of natural antibiotics available in your milk is called lysozyme; are special proteins that help to drive out disease-causing bacteria.
The newest members of the family of proteins, which attracted the interest of nutritionists, are nucleotides. These valuable proteins help the tissues grow stronger, just as the added special substances increase the strength of structural steel. Nucleotide helps your baby's intestinal lining to become stronger by stimulating the growth of intestinal villi - tiny finger-shaped outgrowths that process food and absorb nutrients.
These substances in your milk also help maintain the vital activity of the bacteria that are necessary for your baby's intestines, and suppress those bacteria that do not belong here - this process is called maintaining normal intestinal flora.
How sweet it is!
Spend a taste test. Try artificial milk and breast milk and you will immediately understand why children prefer the present. Breast milk has a fresh taste. Milk from a dry mix has taste of canned food. Human milk contains more lactose( sugar) than milk of any other mammal, 20-30% more than cow's milk. In artificial mixtures, sucrose or glucose is added to make up for the deficiency. So why is it preferable for your child to receive this best sugar? Answer: it is needed by the child's brain! Nutritionists believe that one of the products of processing lactose, galactose, is a vital nutrient for developing brain tissue. In proving the importance of lactose for the development of the central nervous system, the researchers found that among all mammals, the higher the lactose content in milk, the larger the brain of this species. Lactose also improves the absorption of calcium, vital for the developing bones of the microelement. Lactose not only helps to grow the brain and bones, this natural sweetness is needed for your baby's intestines. Lactose causes the growth and multiplication of a useful bacterium that inhabits the intestine, Lactobacillus bifidus.
Vitamins, minerals and iron
No one can produce these substances as good as you. In your milk, these substances are unique due to their high bioavailability, or biological value, which means that most of these substances contained in milk are used by the baby's body. A high evaluation of this or that product is given not only by the amount of the nutrient it contains, but also by how much of it passes through the intestine into the bloodstream. What you see on the labels of artificial mixtures is not at all what the children get into their bloodstream. Vitamins, minerals and iron in your milk have a high biological activity. Most of these high-performance substances come from your milk into the baby's tissues. A very small part is wasted. This is not the case with milk produced by cows or companies. They have low efficiency, low biological activity. Take, for example, iron from breast milk: 50-75% goes to the blood and tissues of the child. Less iron remains unassembled in the intestine. Everything is completely
differently with "another brand".Only 10% of iron from cow's milk and only 4% of iron from iron-enriched mixtures enters the bloodstream. Not so effective.
Not to mention the remnants. In addition to the low efficiency of the nutrients contained in the factory products, excess nutrients that have not been digested excessively overload the excretory system of the child, for which the child pays at the cost of his metabolism( metabolism).Superfluous, non-absorbed substances disrupt the intestinal flora, causing the growth of pathogenic bacteria. We do not yet know all the long-term consequences of these surpluses.
Change as the child grows. Even more effective is your milk, the fact that the amount of these nutrients varies as your child grows. The content of vitamins and minerals in colostrum( the very first milk), transitional milk( in the first week) and in mature milk exactly corresponds to the rapidly changing needs of your child. There are no such goods as colostrum or transitional artificial mixtures.
Facilitators. To further enhance the biological activity of nutrients, human milk contains facilitators - substances that help certain nutrients act better. For example, increased content of vitamin C in human milk improves the absorption of iron. In one interesting experiment, the researchers added an equal amount of iron and zinc to test samples of human milk, cow's milk and artificial mixtures, and milked adult volunteers with these samples. From the test sample of human milk, these nutrients entered the bloodstream more than from other types of milk. In fact, breast milk has a unique formula.