Forty-some years ago, when our three kids were small and I thought I understood how the world worked, I’d sit in the half-dark and watch my wife nurse one of our children. My assumption was that it was a simple plumbing process, with glands producing milk that the child took in and the nourishment helped them grow.
It was a very Cartesian perspective: Mechanical. Plumbing. Food.
Turns out that I was wrong, and new research tells us how amazing — how miraculous, even — is the complexity of this simple system of providing nourishment to our (and, presumably, every other mammal’s) young.
A researcher named Katie Hinde was a postdoc examining hundreds of rhesus monkey breast milk samples, when she noticed something that shouldn’t have been there: the milk wasn’t the same from mother to mother. There was different milk for sons than for daughters, richer in fat and protein for one, larger in volume for another. When she ran the numbers again, the pattern held, causing her to dig in and discover this astonishing dance of nature.
It Turns Out Mom Isn’t Just A Milk Dispenser
Her body listens to the baby’s body and reacts in really significant ways. The infection-fighting white cell count in breast milk can climb from a normal 2,000 cells per milliliter to over 5,000 with the macrophages quadrupling; then, when the child recovers from the illness, the numbers settle back down.
There are different levels of fat and sugars at different times of day, presumably matching a baby’s cycles of activity and sleep. There’s a complex of sugars fine-tuned to nourish the baby’s gut bacteria, providing for a lifetime of good digestion and nourishment. Hind made the point that mother’s milk is both food, medicine, and a form of signaling between baby and mom.
Mom’s body finds out that baby needs extra macrophages, fat, sugars, proteins, etc., by mom’s nipples absorbing some of the baby’s saliva, which contains the chemical signals that let mom know everything that’s happening with the child at that time. It’s so complex that this system can even communicate specific pathogens attacking the child so mom’s breasts can manufacture specific types of antibodies.
So much for Renee Descartes, who told us that the entire universe — and every living thing in it — is just a super-complex machine, that the world is basically a clockwork of dead parts and intelligence only shows up because one of those machines (our brains) became sufficiently complex.
Life is, it turns out, something quite different. It’s part of why you can take your car apart in your driveway, put it back together, and start it up, while if you take a cow apart, you’ll never be able to get it to moo again. Life and consciousness just can’t be explained by the old Cartesian model.
Personalized Immunity Medicine For Babies
Instead, there’s a billion-year-old process that happens millions of times a day in nurseries all over the planet, and it’s smarter than any pharma company could ever even imagine: real-time, personalized, immune medicine, custom-blended for one specific child at a time.
And, it turns out we never discovered it before Hinde came along because nobody thought to look or because the baby formula industry had long ago convinced us that they had everything figured out. She pointed out in her study that we’ve exhaustively studied male erections for a century but never bothered to look into mother’s milk, showing how male- and money-skewed our priorities are.
After all, premature babies in the ICU could really have used this knowledge of personalized immune signaling long ago; the cost of not looking into it is being paid by the smallest and least powerful among us.
Have often have you walked past something “ordinary” for years, only to look at it closely one day and discover it was anything but?
Reprinted with permission from Thom Hartmann’s substack The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human.
Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages and the nation’s #1 progressive radio host, as well as a psychotherapist and international relief worker. Sign up to receive The Hartmann Report, a daily newsletter of Renaissance thinking about progressive politics, economics, science, and the issues of our day.
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