Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, breastfeeding.

For World Breastfeeding Week, Megan Azad, who leads the Manitoba Interdisciplinary Lactation Center in Canada,

joins me to talk about all things breast milk and breastfeeding, from what makes human milk so unique to the barriers and challenges of breastfeeding here in the U.S. and around the world.

Let's listen.

Megan Azad, thank you so much for coming to us on public health on call. How are you? My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I'm great.

Good. Could you tell us a little bit about you and your work? Yeah. So I'm a professor at the University of

Manitoba in Canada in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health. And I'm also a research

scientist at the Children's Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba,

and my lab studies very broadly breastfeeding and breast milk.

And so I come to this area as a biochemist, so I'm really interested in all the different components in the breast milk.

But I have since then also trained in epidemiology, so we have an interest in the public health aspects and implications

of breastfeeding and also in understanding how we best support families to breastfeed.

And you came to us and you said, by the way, world breastfeeding week is coming up. I think

this could be an interesting topic. Tell us about world breastfeeding week. Exactly. So every year,

the first week of August is celebrated around the world as world breastfeeding Week. They have a theme every year. This one is creating sustainable support system. So really looking at how we support breastfeeding. But it's a reason and excuse to talk about breastfeeding, to celebrate it around the world and to really spread awareness about the importance of breastfeeding and the many different aspects of it. I think it's really interesting that you're coming into this with like a biochemistry

lens. Can you tell us like what makes human milk unique? Yeah. So my interest in breastfeeding came from

my prior research on the microbiome. So that's all the bacteria and microbes that live in and on our

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