The Best Reason Breast Milk Comes In Different Colors

Breast milk is Mother Nature’s perfect food for your baby, but just like a sous chef, things can go wrong in the kitchen (i.e. your body) that turns your milk colors. Sometimes, those colors are normal. Other times, those strange hues are a sign that something is amiss. Before you panic, you should know that breast milk almost never looks like the cow’s milk you buy in the store. It’s perfectly normal for your milk to be a little orange, a little blue or even a little green.

Breastfeeding is the most natural act that can be done as mammals; it where humans get the name of their species, after all! However, something that feels decidedly unnatural is pumping breast milk. To have an apparatus attached to a woman’s chest feels odd and rather uncomfortable. Many women start having genuine anxiety about going back to work and how the whole pumping thing will work in their schedules and lives. There are tips that can be given, but there is so much variation in a woman’s lifestyle and work/home balance that variations are endless.

Therefore, there can’t be an exact manual each woman can follow. The old working woman and stay-at-home mom battle that used to be so intense and often bitter has settled down today it seems, as more women do a blend of both. Both the real nastiness seems to come out when it comes to breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Hopefully, this in-fighting will die out as well, because we are all on the same overworked, beleaguered team! Each mom must figure out for herself when, how long and even if to nurse her child.

The human body is a fascinating machine, and motherhood often makes that especially clear. The latest example of this comes from a woman named Mallory Smothers who shared something interesting about her breast milk on Facebook. “This is just cuckoo awesome,” she says, hitting the nail on the head before launching into the explanation.

Smothers pumped the milk on the left on a Thursday night before she and her family went to bed. A few hours later, around 3:00 A.M. Friday morning, she noticed her baby girl was “congested, irritable, and sneezing.” When Smothers pumped a few hours after that, she realized that the milk’s color was dramatically different than it had been just a few hours previous. “Look at how much more the milk I produced Friday resembles colostrum (the super milk full of antibodies and leukocytes [infection-fighting white blood cells] you make during the first few days after birth),” she says.

Her description of colostrum is right on the money. “Colostrum is the initial liquid material that comes out of breast before you actually start lactating in earnest,” Alyssa Dweck, M.D., assistant clinical professor of obstetrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-author of V Is For Vagina, tells SELF. “It does have immunologic benefit, but colostrum only lasts for a few days after delivery until your body figures out how much milk to produce.” Read More....