Busy moms might be sending their babies the wrong signal if they feed evening breast milk that was expressed in the morning, a new study suggests. The composition of breast milk changes throughout the day, including hormones thought to influence babies’ wake/sleep patterns, researchers reported Friday in Frontiers in Nutrition. A mother might unintentionally disturb her infant’s rest if she stores breast milk in the morning and then provides it in the afternoon or evening, researchers warned.
“Breast milk is a dynamic food: Consideration should be given to the time it is fed to the infant when expressed breast milk is used,” lead researcher Melissa Woortman said in a news release. She’s a recent doctoral graduate in nutritional sciences of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “The timing of these cues would be particularly critical in early life, when the infant’s internal circadian clock is still maturing,” senior investigator Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a professor in biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers, said in a news release. To read the full story.