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Momma Knows Best: Celebrities & Breastfeeding


Breastfeeding: Celebrity Baby Blogs


Celebrity Breastfeeding Blogs @ Motherwear

World Breastfeeding Week 2007

Okay, so, I'm a little late... :D But, we all know that I celebrate breastfeeding everyday :))

Here's a small snippet taken from the UNICEF site as to understanding why we have a World Breastfeeding Week:

Why this week to celebrate World Breastfeeding week?

It commemorates the anniversary of the Innocenti Declaration.

INNOCENTI DECLARATION

On the Protection, Promotion and Support of Breastfeeding. Recognising that:

Breastfeeding is a unique process that:

Provides ideal nutrition for infants and contributes to their healthy growth and development Reduces incidence and severity of infectious diseases, thereby lowering infant morbidity and mortality Contributes to women's health by reducing the risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and by increasing the spacing between pregnancies Provides social and economic benefits to the family and the nation Provides most women with a sense of satisfaction when successfully carried out and that Recent Research has found that: these benefits increase with increased exclusiveness of breastfeeding during the first six months of life, and thereafter with increased duration of breastfeeding with complementary foods, and programme intervention can result in positive changes in breastfeeding behaviour.

We therefore declare that:

As a global goal for optimal maternal and child health and nutrition, all women should be enabled to practice exclusive breastfeeding and all infants should be fed exclusively on breastmilk from birth to 4-6 months of age. Thereafter, children should continue to be breastfed, while receiving appropriate and adequate complementary foods, for up to two years of age or beyond. This child-feeding ideal is to be achieved by creating an appropriate environment of awareness and support so that women can breastfeed in this manner.

Some links:


Breastfeedingworld.net


World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action


The Lactation Sensation

KellyMom

Breastfeeding Blinkies & Graphics

Bosom buddies

I'm posting the entire article because I liked it :D

Bosom buddies

We're told that breastfeeding is the most natural thing in the world - but for children of two, three or four? Viv Groskop meets the mums who swear by late feeding (but not on the bus)

Saturday April 30, 2005
The Guardian

With blond pigtails flying, Peri runs in from the garden where she has been making mud pies in towelling pants. She would like a drink of milk, please, or nun-noo, as she calls it. She hops into her mum's lap, curls up her long legs and pulls up her mum's cardigan. Moving from left breast to right, she pulls and pokes, kicking her feet against the chair until she is comfortable, holding a breast with two hands. Sucking loudly and talking as she sucks, she eventually falls asleep, snoring. Her mother smiles contentedly and continues the conversation as if nothing had happened. Standing, Peri comes up to her waist. She will be three in August.

Peri's mother, Helen Butland, 36, from Wolvey, near Coventry, sees breastfeeding not just as a means of boosting a child's immune system, but also as a mothering tool. It's for feeding morning, evening and in-between times, if Peri asks for it, but it's also a glorified cuddle, for when she has a knock or scrape. Helen fed both her other daughters - Erika, now eight, and Frances, now five - up to the age of four, including during two pregnancies and periods after both births when she "tandem-fed" baby and toddler. There was a time when her middle daughter, Frances, then three, stopped feeding after baby Peri arrived, but then she started again: "She came over when I was feeding the baby and said, 'I used to have that - can I still have some?' So I said, of course you can. And after about half an hour of sucking, she was actually getting some again."

Helen is a full-time mother and nonexecutive director of the family business(husband Ian, 32, is an engineer), to which she will return once the children are all at school. Once a radical feminist, she is now deadly serious about the business of being maternal. Indeed, the expression "matronly bosom" could have been created for her. She has been lactating for eight years - "but I know other women who have been for much longer". Peri, she says, can feed as long as she likes - certainly up to her fourth birthday, just as her sisters did. Helen believes that babies should be allowed to be babies for as long as possible. She is only, she says, following the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unicef guidelines, which state that breastfeeding should continue to two years minimum: "I do it in the knowledge of the long-term health benefits - protection against diabetes, heart disease, cancer." There is a benefit for her, too, she adds: breastfeeding mothers are less at risk from breast cancer.

She realises her choice is unusual - "I remember feeling shocked myself the first time I saw a woman feeding a child in outdoor shoes," she admits - but over time she decided it suited her and her children. She chooses not to mix with parents who don't subscribe to the same views: "Early on, I did seek out mother and toddler groups, but I found the disapproval from them quite a knock to me - not about breastfeeding per se, but about the way I do everything - sleeping with my babies, holding them all the time. Other mothers had rules about separation, cots and so on." Cots, she says, are cages.

Her view is that, after a certain age, babies will find their own way off the breast. Her philosophy after the age of two is "don't offer, don't refuse". Gradually, when the child is ready, they stop asking. She believes it has made her daughters more independent, because they have well and truly had their fill of being babies by the time they stop feeding. "When they're three or four, it's still so much part of their emotional needs. Ideally, the nursing relationship will continue until the baby outgrows the need. In their early years, a baby has a powerful need to be with their mother - it is only by fulfilling that need that it will ever go away. The risks of depriving them of that are evident in society today — alienation, diminished capacity for truly loving others. And it serves the marketplace that we grow up unhappy."

In a country where we have one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the developed world, Helen's experience is rare. She is one of a largely invisible group of mothers who practise "extended breastfeeding" - defined as feeding a child after the age of 12 months. In the US, these mothers belong to associations such as the Militant Breastfeeding Cult and IncitefulMamas. They breastfeed exclusively to six months, continue breastfeeding beyond a year and hate dummies, cots and prams (breast, sling and mummy and daddy's bed are best). American militant breastfeeders refer to themselves as "global lactivists", and if their spouse is supportive (which he would have to be) he is described as a "lactivist husband".

In the UK, extended breastfeeders are less aggressive and don't form a cohesive group, but you only have to peek into the internet forums for breastfeeding support organisations to see that these women exist in their thousands. Breastfeeding statistics count only babies who are fed up to the age of nine months - when 13% of babies are still breastfed, according to the most recent Infant Feeding Survey - so beyond that age there is no record of how many women are continuing to feed their children. (This figure would mean there were around 70,000 babies still being breastfed at nine months — and 530,000 on formula.)

Certainly the stereotype of the baby-addicted, neurotic breastfeeder puts some women off continuing. As one mother of two toddlers puts it, "It's going to bite, it's going to talk, it's going to walk - no way." However, Rebecca Kennedy, 38, from Kingston, Surrey, couldn't be further from what she calls the "hairy-armpits, grow-your-own-lentils" image of extended breastfeeding. With a supermodel figure, immaculately coiffed and looking about 10 years younger than she is, she is a walking advert for long-term "nummies" - as her boys called it once they could ask for it. Mother of Archie, 10, Hector, seven, Rollo, four, and Sorrel, 15 months, she fed all her boys to the age of three (including the first two simultaneously) and intends to feed Sorrel for as long as she likes. A former tax consultant in the City (her husband works in banking), Rebecca gave up her career when her first child was born and threw herself into full-time motherhood. She yanks up her Juicy Couture tracksuit top to feed Sorrel (who can talk, walk and has teeth, as well as long, bobbed hair held back with a pink glitter clip), and looks pretty close to "the most natural thing in the world" - the smiley catchphrase of every extended breastfeeder.

The myths about droopy breasts, biting and never ovulating again are nonsense, says Rebecca. Your breasts are affected not by breastfeeding but by your experience of pregnancy. You don't feel the child's teeth. In terms of affecting fertility, it depends on the woman - some ovulate at five months if they're still feeding, others not until 15 months. Despite Rebecca's evangelism, though, she is discreet. "Most people don't know how long I fed my children because I don't go around advertising the fact. If they do know, they are very surprised about it." She has always avoided feeding her children in public after the age of two ("I would just distract them or say mummy's not wearing the right T-shirt") because of adverse reactions.

She admits that lactating for 10 years with only a few months' break during her pregnancies has been tough: "Breastfeeding is a bit like eating Mars bars - the first one is delicious, but then the more you have, you start to feel sick. I have mixed views about it finishing."

You don't have to eat more, as you do with a tiny baby, to maintain your milk supply, but ultimately it is tiring, especially around pregnancy. So why does she continue?

"There is always a nutritional benefit to breastfeeding," says Rebecca. "The real advantage is if they get a tummy bug or something, they can still feed." Aren't they overly dependent on her? "I think that, by allowing your child to be with you, you allow them to leave you when they're ready. We never had the terrible twos - if they were hungry or frustrated, they could feed."

There is no medical reason why a mother shouldn't feed her child as long as she - and the child - wants. Dr Miriam Stoppard, author of The Family Health Guide (Dorling Kindersley), says the health benefits to a baby continue no matter how long they are breastfed. "Breastmilk contains a hormone that helps the digestive system," says Stoppard. "In breastfed babies, the system is then mature enough to take mixed feeding [with solids] and robust enough to resist allergies. Breastmilk also contains some great mood-enhancing chemicals - opioids, which make the baby contented and sleep well. And breastfed babies definitely cry less."

Psychologist Dr Ros Bramwell of the University of Liverpool argues that it is only our societal attitudes that militate against later breastfeeding. "The breast is very sexualised and people's attitudes to seeing an exposed breast are very negative - even in private," she says. "The issue of 'who are my breasts for?' can cause a lot of conflict in women. Emphasising the benefits of breastfeeding is great, but it doesn't address the difficulty of this problem. I think with extended breastfeeding, it gets worse - there is a huge conflict between the sexuality of the breast and using it to feed. The unusualness is what makes it shocking." This is also connected to our perception of children and how quickly they should grow up, she adds. "Breastfeeding is seen as something that is only for babies - we see it as a babyish thing to do."

Lisa Cavadias, 30, a pensions administrator from Flitwick, Bedfordshire, says that, on the contrary, her breastfed daughter, Marie, two, is more advanced as a result. Marie learned the baby sign for breastfeeding (hand squeezing the fingers, as if milking a cow) at the age of one and now speaks in seven-word sentences, including: "Please can I have some mummy milk?" (When asked why she likes mummy milk, she replies, "Because it tastes nice.") A sunny, salt-of-the-earth type, Lisa is more like the traditional 1970s breastfeeder: long hair, flowing, flowery dress with breastfeeding flaps, literally barefoot and pregnant. She obviously enjoys her relationship with her daughter - who is unusually bright and lively, stomping through the house in yellow Tweenies wellies - but it has not always been easy. "Once they get past a year," says Lisa, "they feed in all sorts of different positions. And she is a nipple-twiddler, which can be very painful. Sometimes I just want to say, 'I'm not just a breast, there is actually a mummy in here, too.'"

Lisa has had to contend with disapproval and hassle (she expressed at work in the early days, so her daughter could still drink breastmilk during the day). "I try to put her off feeding in public, because you get looks and comments once they start to walk. There have been comments I was meant to overhear: 'That's disgusting'; 'She shouldn't be doing that in here.'" Despite being eight months pregnant, she has continued to feed because her daughter enjoys it. "We hope it will help with jealousy issues," says Lisa. "She'll know that she is still my baby, too." Gaby Jeffs, 38, a video director from Herne Hill, south-east London, also faced opposition to her breastfeeding. Her son, now four, was fed to 13 months. Sitting at the kitchen table on her mum's lap, daughter Elizabeth, three, is still delving around in her mother's shirt looking for "boo-boo", although she gave up feeding a few months ago. Despite this, she is no more clingy than any other three-year-old, and within seconds is distracted, running off to fetch her own baby doll - whom her mother allows her to feed with a bottle, with reservations. ("That is quite extreme of me, isn't it?" says Gaby. "But you can't exactly let a child breastfeed a doll, so I had to give in.") "There were times when my parents were saying, 'This has gone on long enough.'" I got pleurisy and had serious antibiotics when Elizabeth was about 12 months, and you can imagine what everyone said: 'Oh, yes, now is the time to stop.' Also, Elizabeth has had problems with the enamel on her teeth - a gestational problem, it turns out - and the consultant at hospital said, 'Hmm, that's breastmilk for you.' In public, even now if I am carrying Elizabeth, she will put her hand down my top and I get raised eyebrows." As another glamorous militant breastfeeder (she and her mini-me daughter have huge, brown eyes and Louise Brooks bobs), she, too, hopes late feeding is losing its links with the "brown rice brigade".

Anecdotally, at least, there is a suggestion that their numbers could be on the increase. UK-based international lactation consultant Pamela Morrison "strongly suspects" there are a lot of secret late breastfeeders around. Late breastfeeding is like co-sleeping (having your child in your bed), she says - no one likes to admit that they do it. "There is extremely strong cultural pressure to wean an older baby and the pressure becomes more and more intense the older the child, more or less forcing mothers to 'closet-nurse'."

Valerie Goedkoop, 37, was one of these women. A doula and breastfeeding counsellor from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, who until recently ran Breast Friends, a support group, Valerie fed her first baby to eight months and the second to 19 months. "At the time, when I went past a year, I didn't tell anybody. I couldn't be bothered having the criticism. When someone makes a comment, it's often a negative one - which comes from ignorance or guilt. I think there are lots of secret breastfeeders out there. I think people do it in the evenings and don't tell anybody."

Numbers are also likely to be increasing because of birth trends. Nowadays better-educated, middle-class women are giving birth later in life - all factors linked to the uptake and continuation of breastfeeding. Morrison explains: "The baby with the greatest chance of being breastfed to a year appears to have a mother older than 30, who was educated past the age of 18 and lives in south-east England."

Abigail Thompson, 18, from Bolton, Lancashire, mother of Jake, 22 months, and Arabella, seven months, is a rare exception to these statistics. A full-time mum, her partner, Colin Doyle, 22, is the manager of a skip company. She left college at 16 to have her first baby and found out about breastfeeding by surfing the net. "I have never met a mum of my age breastfeeding. The information and support available to young mums is terrible. I had the frequent advice of 'give him a bottle of formula'."

Abigail was recently breastfeeding her daughter outside a cafe in the local precinct and was asked to "go and do that somewhere else". She regrets giving in to "the aggressive advertising of follow-on milk" with her son, and was determined not to let anyone stop her breastfeeding her daughter, whom she is now happy to feed up to the age of four. Everything she knows about breastfeeding comes from the internet — the only other breastfeeding mothers she knows are in cyberspace. She now expresses 5oz every two days for her son ("so at least he'll still get some benefits"), as she notices a direct comparison between her two children - Jake got colds as soon as he went on to formula; Arabella, who has been fed exclusively on breast milk, has never been ill.

Of course, the well-publicised crisis in the breastfeeding world is the small number of women who stick with breastfeeding in the first place, let alone to a year or beyond. In the first week, 69% of babies are breastfed. By the end of two weeks, that figure drops to 52%. After six weeks, it's 42%. At six months — the age at which all babies should, according to government guidelines, remain on breastmilk exclusively — only 21% are still at it. Despite the semi-closeted militant mothers, there is a huge stigma attached to feeding a baby beyond this age. The fact that we are shocked by anyone other than the tiniest of babies suckling a woman's breasts cannot help. The "bitty" sketches in the BBC2 comedy Little Britain, in which actor Geraldine James is seen feeding a fully grown David Walliams and squirting milk everywhere, represent a fear that persists - that breastfeeding is weird, freaky and embarrassing.

It is perhaps because of our bitty-phobic attitude that we lag behind every European country with the exception of Ireland and France. In Norway, for example, according to Rachel Myr, a lactation consultant and midwife at a hospital in Kristiansand, breastfeeding initiation rates are at 95% (compared with the UK's 69%), with 40% of babies still breastfed (along with solids) at one year. In the UK, the rate is less than 13%, and the figures don't even go up to a year. Myr says, "I have worked on a maternity ward for 16 years, and I can't recall ever having met a Norwegian woman who would willingly admit to not having a desire to breastfeed. We never ask them whether they 'want' to breastfeed. It is assumed they do. It would almost be like asking, 'And will you be doing your own perspiring, or have you decided to go with commercial sweat?'"

Longer breastfeeding is the average in developing countries (where five is a normal weaning age) and in certain US outposts. There is extreme and there is extreme. One US survey by breastfeeding guru Kathy Dettwyler suggested that the minimum age for stopping breastfeeding should be two and a half years, and the maximum seven years. Dettwyler's 2004 survey of 1,280 American children who had been breastfed beyond the age of three found that more than 200 children breastfed over the age of five (a few dozen fed to age eight or nine). In 2002, one Illinois mother was investigated by child welfare officials after she was filmed breastfeeding her eight-year-old son on the TV show Good Morning America. (Madonna declared at the time, "That's incest".) For even Britain's most militant breastfeeders, this is beyond the pale: most take the view that a child will self-wean by the age of four.

Morrison argues that our distaste for older breastfeeding is not a given - it's purely cultural and has existed only over the past 50 years: "In a society like we have in the UK, where most babies are breastfed for only a matter of days, weeks or months, we describe breastfeeding beyond one year as 'extended'. On the other hand, if we are thinking in global terms, where most young children continue to breastfeed for two or three years, we would describe most children weaning before that time as 'premature'."

Cultural resistance is slow to break down, however. Vicky Johns, 34, runs a Bosom Buddy network in Blandford Forum, Dorset. She fed her first child to 18 months, her second to the age of three. "Even at breastfeeding support groups, women don't tend to breastfeed the older ones. I was quite embarrassed about extended breastfeeding. It is something that is done in private. It's such a shame." She used to think that, with the breastfeeding awareness initiatives, attitudes were changing, but now she's not sure. "Now that my son has started school - he's four - and I'm back in the real world [with non-breastfeeding mothers], I don't think there has been a change at all. More people have started with breastfeeding, but they're not continuing beyond a few weeks."

The biggest obstacle to making longer-term breastfeeding seem at all normal is that living as these women do is not an option for many mothers. If you want your baby to be exclusively breastfed and you work, you need to spend time expressing milk in your workplace. By choosing to breastfeed your child - especially exclusively, if you want the child to have no other milk until after the age of one - you are effectively choosing to become a stay-at-home mother.

While women are bombarded with messages of the importance of continuing breastfeeding, the support system available to them is shaky: organisations such as the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), La Leche League and the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers are staffed largely by volunteers. The danger of bottle-bashing is a big problem: all the extended breastfeeders are keen to stress that what they do is their choice, and is not for everyone. Gaby Jeffs believes that if breastfeeding for any length of time was considered more normal, there could be an open discussion about the problems with formula versus breastfeeding: "We should be telling people not that breast is best, but that breast is the norm. And the bottle has risks. There is not much information about that tells you the truth - that with formula your baby will be more ill, will see the doctor more often, will have more chance of heart disease and childhood diabetes."

Meanwhile, back in Coventry, after half an hour three-year-old Peri slips off her mother's breast into a deep sleep. Helen Butland laughs when she thinks about her own previous attitudes to parenting. "I used to think full-time mothers were letting down the sisterhood." She herself never intended to breastfeed past three months, and here she is eight lactating years later. "I don't see what I'm doing as altruistic - I just want my children to be happy adults and to fulfil themselves in whatever way they want, and to be independent from me. I think that introducing premature separation is not going to guarantee those things the way this form of mothering does. I would like society to breastfeed like this because I believe it would be a better place — people would be emotionally fulfilled."

· For further information on breastfeeding, contact NCT's
Breastfeeding Helpline, 0870 444 8707; La Leche League, 0845 120 2918;
Association of Breastfeeding Mothers, 0870 401 7711.

If You Take Painkillers During Childbirth, You May Have Difficulty Breastfeeding

Another reason to give birth naturally!

Epidurals and other painkillers used to ease childbirth are linked with decreased rates of breastfeeding. This is the result of a new study led by Dr Siranda Torvaldsen, a senior researcher in the Facultly of Medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Of course, there's more to the article... click the link and read :D

UTMB researchers discover breast-feeding overcomes genetic tendency to ear infections

Here's the link to the article and below is a snippet from it:

“This is a major finding, that breast-feeding neutralized the effect even in kids who had all the genetic polymorphisms,” Patel said. “Not only that, they were protected from recurrent infections even later in childhood, long after they stopped breast-feeding.”

Its cool how more and more evidence is proving how beneficial breastmilk really is.

Breast-milk compounds could be a tonic for adult ills

Copied and pasted from here:

Julie J. Rehmeyer

Catharina Svanborg thought that she already knew how remarkable breast milk is. The immunologist had logged hundreds of lab hours documenting ways in which human milk helps babies fight infections. But when the group decided to use cancerous lung cells to avoid the variability shown by normal cells in laboratory tests, Svanborg and her team at Lund University in Sweden were in for a surprise. They applied breast milk to the cancerous lung cells, and all the cells died. Breast milk killed cancer cells.

GOAT GOODS.
A transgenic goat named Artemis produces in her milk a human-breast milk compound called lysozyme. Lysozyme destroys bacteria by drilling through their cell walls.
E. Scharfen

"From that moment on, we've been working with it," Svanborg says.

Svanborg's serendipitous discovery of human milk's anticancer power is remarkable, but other researchers have also been finding that breast milk can both protect against and heal a remarkable variety of ailments. Perhaps these properties shouldn't be surprising: Of the thousands of substances that people eat, breast milk is the only one that evolved under natural pressure to keep people healthy.

Research teams are now learning to exploit its tricks for purposes well beyond feeding babies. Components of breast milk are being developed as drugs that fight viruses and bacteria. A particular target is diarrhea, which kills about 2.2 million
people every year, mostly children in developing countries. Other milk compounds may be added to food to improve digestion. Some milk components might fight medical conditions ranging from arthritis to septic shock.

Although some of these compounds are found in milk from other animals, others occur only in human milk, and the nonhuman versions are generally less potent in people. This presents a challenge, since human-breast milk is not available for sale. So, researchers are developing new sources for the compounds, including genetically modified bacteria, rice, goats, and cows.

The potential for therapies derived from milk is "enormous, absolutely tremendous," says Marian Kruzel, an immunologist at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.


Good bugs and bad bugs
The protective properties of mother's milk have long been apparent. Breast-fed babies, for instance, get diarrhea half as often as infants who are fed formula do. Decades ago, scientists began wondering how breast milk stops the pathogens that cause diarrhea.

In the 1950s, Lars Hanson, an immunologist at Göteborg University in Sweden, started to solve the puzzle. He found that mothers produce antibodies in their milk and that way pass on to their babies immunities that the women had acquired over their lifetimes.

But the antibodies in breast milk didn't explain all the observations. For example, breast-fed babies have different bacteria in their guts than formula-fed babies do. The breast feeders harbor more of the beneficial, food-digesting bacteria, such as acidophilus and bifidus, as well as less of the coliform Escherichia coli and other germs that can make infants sick.

When scientists started analyzing breast milk, they found that the third-largest constituent of breast milk, making up about 1 percent by volume, is a mixture of indigestible sugars known as oligosaccharides. Many of these sugars occur only in human milk.

Initially, the scientists thought that these were useless by-products of milk production. But why would mothers expend so much energy creating compounds that their babies can't use?

In the past few years, scientists have solved this puzzle. David Newburg, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and his colleagues genetically
engineered mice to produce oligosaccharides in their milk. He then gave their pups campylobacter, a bacterium that causes diarrhea. The pups that drank oligosaccharides didn't get sick.

Unlike the antibodies that mothers pass along to their infants through breast milk, oligosaccharides can protect the baby from pathogens to which the mother has never been exposed.

For a pathogen to infect a person via the digestive tract, it first has to latch on to the sugars that line the gut wall. Oligosaccharides have binding sites that are identical to the ones on the gut-wall sugars, so the pathogens attach to the oligosaccharides instead of to the lining of the gut. Once bound to oligosaccharides, pathogens travel harmlessly through the intestinal tract.

Surprisingly, bacteria that aid digestion prosper in the presence of oligosaccharides. Bruce German, a nutritionist at the University of California, Davis, proposes that only the beneficial bacteria digest some of the oligosaccharides, thereby gaining an advantage over the harmful bacteria. This theory is controversial, however.

German says that the beneficial microbes' advantage is a natural consequence of the coevolution of breast milk and gut bacteria. Oligosaccharides occur in thousands of slightly different forms, and the precise mix of types of oligosaccharides varies from woman to woman. Those who produced breast milk with oligosaccharides that only beneficial bacteria can eat must have had an evolutionary advantage.

German notes that because of this evolutionary process, some bacteria in human digestive tracts are found nowhere else on Earth. "What milk did is recruit an entire life form to protect the infant," German says. "To me, that's pretty inspiring stuff."

German and other scientists want to leverage that protection for babies that aren't breast-fed and for adults too. Oligosaccharides might augment elderly people's weakened natural protection against pathogens. After people have taken strong antibiotics, the sugars could help them recolonize their digestive tracks with beneficial bacteria. Foreign travelers or military personnel who expect to be exposed to unfamiliar pathogens could take oligosaccharides as a preventive measure.

Newburg expects that as bacteria continue to develop resistance to antibiotics,
oligosaccharides will be increasingly important for fighting pathogens. "This is a totally different type of defense against pathogens that mammals have been using for thousands of years, and it still works," Newburg says.

He suggests that bacteria can't evolve a resistance to oligosaccharides because if they change in such a way that they no longer bind to the oligosaccharide, they also can't bind to the cell wall to infect their targets. "The mechanisms for protection in milk are so exquisite," Newburg marvels.

Procuring a supply of oligosaccharides for preventive or therapeutic treatments presents a challenge. Newburg is working to genetically engineer E. coli bacteria to produce the sugars.

"What motivates me personally is the large number of babies in the Third World who have diarrhea," Newburg says. Oligosaccharides added to formula could protect
babies who don't receive breast milk.


Bioengineering milk
Getting bacteria to produce human oligosaccharides would be only the first step toward Newburg's vision. For protection against infections, people would have to eat substantial amounts of oligosaccharides regularly. So, to make supplements for adults or for baby formula, bacteria would need to produce oligosaccharides in large quantities and at low cost.

ATTACK THWARTED. Bacteria that can cause pneumonia attack a throat cell (top) by attaching to sugar chains on the cell. In a solution of oligosaccharides—indigestible sugars contained in breast milk—the pneumococci bind to the sugars and don't latch on to the throat cell (bottom).
B. Andersson

On the other hand, genetic engineering of larger organisms has already produced inexpensive and abundant supplies of two other human-breast–milk compounds: lysozyme and lactoferrin.

In 1998, scientists genetically engineered a goat to excrete lysozyme in its milk, and in 2002, another team created one variety of rice that produces human lysozyme and another variety that yields human lactoferrin. Also in 2002, a team engineered a cow to produce human lactoferrin. As a result, researchers are for the first time performing large-scale clinical trials of lactoferrin and lysozyme.

Lactoferrin is a dazzlingly multitalented protein. In breast-fed babies, it can appropriately suppress inflammation or boost immune activity. It also fights viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Even after the protein has broken down in the gut, the fragments fight urinary-tract infections as they are expelled from the body.

Because lactoferrin lowers the immune system's inflammatory overreactions, it may be useful against arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and septic shock. In 1998, when
researchers treated piglets with lactoferrin before inducing septic shock, the compound reduced mortality to less than one-fourth of that in untreated piglets. In 2001, another group showed that treating rats in septic shock with lactoferrin dramatically reduced blood-toxin concentrations.

The many claims for lactoferrin's capabilities "may look suspicious," admits Michal Zimecki, an immunologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw. Lactoferrin "seems like a golden bullet, but it really is so."

Lysozyme is, by comparison, a one-trick pony: It chews up bacterial cell walls. However, its trick is fine-tuned. Lysozyme selectively destroys deleterious bacteria, usually leaving the beneficial ones unharmed.

At a clinic in Peru, Bo Lönnerdal, a nutritionist at the University of California, Davis, recently conducted a trial of a combination of lactoferrin and lysozyme against diarrhea. The standard treatment for acute diarrhea in children there is simple rehydration with a solution of sugar and salt.

Lönnerdal added his two compounds to the solution given to half the children treated. Those who received lactoferrin and lysozyme, he found, recovered more quickly and were less prone to a repeat bout of the disease. The study is scheduled to appear in an upcoming Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.


Killer milk

As outlandish as lactoferrin's potential may seem, it is perhaps even stranger to think that breast milk components could cure cancer.

Once Svanborg and her team had established that something in breast milk was killing human cancer cells in the lab, they isolated the assassin. It turned out to be
the protein alpha-lactalbumin. But the compound becomes lethal only when exposed to acid, as it is in a stomach and was in the lab. The acid unfolds the alpha lactalbumin protein into a havoc-wreaking form.

Svanborg dubbed the acidified form of the protein HAMLET, for human alpha-lactalbumin made lethal to tumors.

Cancer cells take up far more HAMLET than healthy cells do. The huge quantities of unfolded proteins destroy the cancer cells.

Svanborg found that HAMLET killed 40 kinds of tumor cells in lab dishes. She has also studied the reactive compound in rats with human-cancer cells implanted in
their brains. She used an invasive cancer called glioblastoma that usually kills people in less than a year. She injected HAMLET directly into the tumors of some of the rats, while others received injections of alpha-lactalbumin that hadn't been activated by acid.

After 7 weeks, the rats getting inactive protein bore tumors seven times, on average, as large as the tumors in the HAMLET-treated rats, the researchers reported in 2004.

Svanborg has also found that HAMLET reduces warts in people. Warts and tumors share the property of growing without respect to normal controls. HAMLET reduced the volume of more than 95 percent of the warts to which it was applied, whereas only 20 percent of warts treated with a placebo decreased in size.

Svanborg is currently concluding human trials of HAMLET for bladder cancer. She says that her results "look very good," and that the treatment produced no side
effects. Pharmaceutical companies are now developing the activated protein for clinical use.

Hanson, the first scientist to isolate immune antibodies from breast milk, says that HAMLET is "quite a discovery," especially since it seems to be effective against so many kinds of cancer. He cautions, though, that "the crucial thing will be the clinical studies."

Whether or not breast milk turns out to be the source of a potent cancer therapy, its remarkable properties have led to a new view of its role. "My thinking on milk has changed totally," says Newburg. "I used to think of it as the best source of nutrients. Now, it's looking like milk is really designed to be protective."

Soon, that protection may extend to the rest of us.

The references are listed under the article online.