What happens when babies drink night milk in the morning, or morning milk in the late afternoon?
We don't know for sure, because this question has been woefully understudied. Offering an infant a bottle of morning milk in the evening, with its high cortisol and low melatonin, might be the nutritional equivalent of flipping the lights on right before bedtime.If chronosignals in milk do indeed help to calibrate infant circadian biology, then infants who drink"mistimed" milk may struggle more with sleep, digestion and development.
There's a fairly easy fix, of course. Mothers can label their milk with the time it was pumped and coordinate infant feedings to offer morning milk in the morning, afternoon milk in the afternoon and night milk at night. If this became standard practice in neonatal intensive care units, we think that thousands of infants could benefit from milk served right on time, potentially helping them better regulate their circadian rhythms. Many NICUs have already adopted practices designed to better regulate infant circadian biology, such as dimming the lights at night, so time-matched milk would be a logical next step. Similarly, milk banks that accept donor milk could sort milk into batches by time of day.
There's a simpler alternative to time-matching pumped milk: boosting women's ability to breastfeed their infants right on the spot by offering reasonable paid parental leave policies. Mothers who can feed their infants directly don't need to worry about organizing their milk by time of day, and milk that is offered straight from the breastResearch continues to explore the role of breast milk in timekeeping and its impact on infant health and development.
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