He publishes a really fascinating article this month the scientific magazine par excellence: Scientific American that reveals that the Human milk changes its composition even depending on social factors.
We know that breast milk adapts to the baby's needs almost miraculously. It is different if the baby is premature, adapts to the newborn and changes when it grows and at the end of breastfeeding, its concentration in fat and immune factors is much higher, so much that it compensates for the decrease in teats providing equal protection to the older children
But: It also changes if the baby is a male or a female depending on the environmental economic situation? It seems to be true.
The fundamental work they comment on, carried out by students at the University of Michigan, was done by analyzing the milk of women in rural areas of Kenya and revealed something surprising: women with a good socioeconomic position produced more fat-rich milk for men, but those of the poorest social classes did it for girls.
The conclusion indicated that it could be social factors that influenced the composition of milk, since the richest were more interested in the survival of boys, who could later be, in a polygamous society, parents of many children, but in the poorer classes, girls were the ones who, when married, could secure offspring. The explanation they venture is that natural selection favors the survival of males in times of bonanza and, in times of scarcity, invests more in the survival of females.
It is true that the hypothesis is very risky, but I cannot deny that it is fascinating to ask ourselves, whether demonstrable or not, that breast milk may change in composition depending on socioeconomic environmental factors, as a way to adapt the survival of the species to the environment. What do you think about it?
