Why the Internet Is Obsessed With This Photo of Breast Milk

When you're pumping breast milk, you tend to collect a lot of containers that look exactly the same, except for the amount — sometimes the stuff is just flowing, and other times not so much. (That's why a lot of moms write the date on the bags to keep track of what's what.) 

So when a mom from Arkansas named Mallory Smothers pumped one bag on a Thursday night before going to bed and another the next morning, she was surprised to see how different the contents looked. She posted the above photo on Facebook and detailed her "cuckoo awesome" discovery about breast milk. 

"I nurse Baby every 2 hours or so overnight and don't pump until we get up for the day," she wrote on Facebook. Early Friday morning, she noticed her daughter was "congested, irritable, and sneezing," so she assumed she had come down with a cold. 

When she pumped again, she saw that the latest batch of milk "resembles colostrum," the form of milk that's packed with infection-fighting antibodies and leukocytes that moms make in the first few days after birth and that's fittingly referred to as "liquid gold." ​  

Smothers remembered an article she'd read recently that explained this phenomenon but was still stunned to see it play out in reality. "Mom's milk changes to tailor baby's needs in more ways than just caloric intake​," Smothers wrote, describing the phenomenon in which mammary gland receptors respond to pathogens in baby's backwash and trigger the production of milk with a new immunological composition and customized antibodies.

Research confirms it: A 2013 study in ​Clinical and Translational Immunology​ found that when a baby (or a mom) is ill, the numbers of leukocytes in its mother's breast milk spike. 

Breast milk that's made-to-order to guard against sickness? Yeah, our bodies are pretty damn awesome.

Smothers's post has over 70,000 shares.

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