Saturday, February 15, 2014

It's time to study human breast milk

Should we be exploring gender-specific baby formula? Researchers have shown that monkeys and cows customize their milk according to whether the baby is a boy or a girl. Monkeys' milk is richer in fat when the baby is a male, especially if it is the first baby born to that mother. But the mother makes a lot more milk when the baby is a girl. The same thing happened with cows whose calves were females.

The milk monkeys produced for female babies contained more calcium. Guess what? Female monkey babies' skeletons develop faster than males. Human girls’ skeletons mature faster than boys, too, but there haven’t been similar studies of calcium in human breast milk.

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