Breastfeeding week is upon us and the usual negative articles slicing away at breastfeeding confidence, slyly suggesting it ain’t as good as we think, are being published, as happens every June/July.
It’s like elections in T&T but annually. As soon as you see workers mysteriously appear, cleaning up the sidewalks, pulling grass and piling it up in very neat little clumps at the side of the road to disappear when rain falls, you know elections are not far off. It’s the same with anti-breastfeeding articles.
And just like our council workers who work quite well, neat up their mess, then leave it at the side of the road for someone to clean up, the authors of these negative breastfeeding articles sound very reasonable, are well-trained psychologically and leave a neat little mess of doubt in our minds: “3.56 per cent of mothers in Sudan cannot breastfeed because of undernutrition and one wonders what the percentage really is in Mexican migrant workers in Valley View, Nevada.” Huh? They then move on to the next cheque.
In the 1970s these same people claimed that classical breastfeeding stools, a watery, curry-coloured pastiche that might occur five to six times a day in a well-fed baby, were abnormal. Healthy breastfed babies would be referred to the various gastro wards in the country and treated for gastro.
That would entail, separating the baby from the mother, stopping breastfeeding, taking blood and stool samples, starting an intravenous drip, starving the baby for several days and giving poisonous cocktails of medicines containing bismuth, belladonna and codeine, the infamous BBC syrup, probably more responsible for being associated with deaths, than tainted cough syrups in Indonesia and the Gambia.
Breastfeeding and stools, “poop” as the Americans like to call it, is as ugly a word as one could imagine when you could call it in our baby Trini speech, “poo poo”. It’s like the harsh “butt”, used instead of our softer and feminine, “bumsie”. Or “summer diarrhoea” instead of “mango gastro”.
But poop is back in the news. Good poop!
We have known for some years that transferring good “poop” (in capsule form) from people with healthy intestinal bacteria into the intestine of people with certain intestinal diseases due to the presence of abnormal bacteria, improves their intestinal health and helps relieve diarrhoea, gas, cramps and bleeding.
Now comes news that the mother’s “pooping” during birth is good for the newborn baby. Some of us have known this for the last 20 years.
At that time I thought it a difficult topic to write about since faeces was a bad word and the idea of “cleanliness” being biologically important was still uppermost in people’s minds. Today, despite the best efforts of the Covid police, and living as we do, surrounded by filth, the idea that dirt can’t be too harmful, is fairly well accepted.
This is the idea that there are beneficial germs. There are more beneficial germs than there are harmful ones. Inside us, there are ten beneficial microorganisms for every human cell. Every one of us is host to about 100 trillion good bacteria.
There are so many bacteria inside of us that one has to wonder what we really are. They are essential for good health. They assist in digestion, promote the development of the immune system and they detoxify harmful chemicals.
Giving birth has always been a messy process. Gloriously messy, dirty and even filthy. Apart from the blood and secretions, it’s common for the mother to defecate as she expels the baby. Some obstetricians give the mother an enema so as not to soil their lily-white hands. There’s a reason why this is not a good idea.
It turns out that, as the baby is born, face down, its nose and mouth are tucked into the mother’s bottom and this is the very first time it comes in contact with bacteria outside the womb and vagina.
As it takes its first lick, it ingests beneficial bacteria from the mother’s “poo poo” and this is exactly what the baby needs to develop a strong immune system.
The more of the mother’s faeces there is during birth, the more likely the baby is going to get a good swallow and in doing so the greater the likelihood that the mother’s beneficial bacteria will reach and colonise the baby’s gut. This is scientifically called “feeding and seeding” of the baby’s gut bacteria and this plays a pivotal role in developing the baby’s immune system and therefore future health.
And as if to complete the cycle, breastmilk provides special indigestible sugars, called HMOS, that specifically feed those beneficial microbes coming from the mother. Honestly, we should be celebrating defecation during birth.
