Welcome to Wellness and Mass with Dr. Nicole Sapphire. I am Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and today's

episode we are going to talk about something near and dear to my heart. And I'm talking literally

and figuratively. That's right. We're talking about breastfeeding. Now, we tend to oversimplify

this because most of us just think of human

breast milk as food, calories, fat, protein, something you can just list on the label. But the

reality is human breast milk, it's not static nutrition. It's quite dynamic. It's a living

system that adapts to a baby's needs in real

time. So while we can talk about, oh, formula feeding is equivalent to breastfeeding. No, it's not.

The reality is breast milk changes hour to hour, day-to-day to week, month to month, based on the baby's

needs. And that matters. Because when we talk about rising childhood illness, immune dysfunction,

allergies, asthma, obesity, this is one of the earliest biological exposures that we just

can't ignore. Breastfeeding isn't just about bonding, although

obviously it is an incredible bonding session between baby and mother. It's also about immune

education for the baby, gut development, and long-term health programming, and the science behind it,

it's actually starting to go viral. That's why I talked about it this

past weekend on Fox and Friends, because the more we study human breast milk, just the more

impressive it becomes. Human breast milk changes by the day, by the feeding, even by the time

of day. Early milk, also called colostrum, is packed with antibodies, especially IGA. This acts as a newborn's

first immune shield. As the baby grows, the milk shifts. The composition of what's in the milk

changes to based on what the baby needs. The protein levels decrease as the kidneys mature because too much protein for kidneys,

baby, or adults is not a good thing. And the fat and lactose actually increase as the brain

growth accelerates because we need those healthy fatty acids for brain growth. Even within one

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